How M42 Modernized Legal Ops with Coheso
Sep 3, 2025
Written by
The 10-Person Legal Team Enabling Care for 15 Million Patients a Year
M42 is the largest healthcare company in the Middle East and a global health champion powered by artificial intelligence. Formed in 2022 through the merger of G42 Healthcare and Mubadala Health, M42 has been a vital provider of medical services and innovative healthcare solutions, including genomics and biobanks. M42 operates over 480 facilities across 26 countries, delivering care through 100+ service lines to over 15 million patients annually.
Central to the operation of this global health enterprise is a 10-person legal team. The legal function operates with exceptional efficiency in a highly complex, multi-jurisdictional environment. In a company where scale and coordination are essential, legal needs to be powered by systems that match the pace and complexity of the business.
When Efftichia (Effie) Dower, Vice President of Legal, joined M42, she immediately saw an opportunity to transform how legal services were delivered across the organization. The team had already established effective processes but didn’t have the infrastructure to scale them. Effie understood the benefits and challenges of legal tech implementations from working alongside legal operations pioneers. She set out to create a sophisticated, AI-enabled system that would unify siloed entry points and modernize how business units engage with legal.
The Challenge of Delivering Legal at Scale
M42’s legal team was spending considerable time on high-volume, low-complexity work. Repetitive inquiries better addressed through AI-enabled self-service or automation, went through the same channels as substantive work. Despite acting as a cohesive unit, work was dispersed across the legal team to individual email inboxes based on business outreach. Relying on email alone created challenges for the legal team and the business:
No visibility or intake structure: Without a centralized intake process, legal struggled to see how work flowed across the department. Business users were similarly in the dark, unsure who was handling their request or when to expect a response.
Inconsistent timelines and unmanaged expectations: With no formal SLAs, response times varied widely. Legal had no consistent way to manage expectations, navigate unrealistic deadlines, or prioritize urgent work.
Lost context and time-consuming back-and-forth: Requests often lacked key details and were routed to the wrong person. This created delays, duplicative work, and frequent check-ins that cluttered inboxes and disrupted cross-functional collaboration.
Distraction from high-impact work: Requests that could have been handled with automation or AI-enabled self-service were still being completed manually, diverting time and focus from strategic initiatives.
No data to improve or demonstrate impact: Even as the team made meaningful process improvements, the lack of structure and data made it challenging to demonstrate progress, surface insights, and identify opportunities for deeper integration with the business.
The legal team needed a structured way to receive, triage, and automate responses to legal requests. Sitting at the forefront of AI in the healthcare industry, the legal team also saw an opportunity to contribute to the adoption of AI across the enterprise. In addition to request management and automation, M42 wanted to reduce legal time spent on repetitive questions that could be answered from standard internal policies, resources, and process documents.
Choosing a Scalable Legal Hub
M42 selected Coheso’s AI-native legal front door and work management platform as its centralized legal hub. Coheso stood out for its intuitive design, embedded AI, and robust integrations.
With all requests flowing through Coheso, legal can trigger downstream processes across integrated tools without requiring business or legal teams to log into separate solutions. This repeatable architecture means change management no longer stands in the way of deploying new automations that power legal work product.
From the start, the legal team knew they didn’t want work sitting across separate systems. Their goal was to have one central, connected system that could pass data to and from point solutions, allowing them to power more advanced outcomes without adding complexity to day-to-day workflows.
M42 implemented a new CLM alongside the Coheso platform. Coheso’s universal CLM connector made this a powerful combination. M42 developed integrated workflows with advanced outcomes through a simple form builder in Coheso. Business inputs submitted in Coheso are passed to the CLM and automatically trigger the creation of standard agreements.
“If you can free up time, why wouldn’t you? We've automated high-volume work to the point where no one wants to go back to doing it manually. What used to take hours is now instantaneous.”
— Effie Dower, VP of Legal
With this connection in place, instead of searching for templates or revisiting email threads, legal clicks a link in Coheso and receives a completed document based on inputs from the business. The predictability and speed helped reinforce adoption. Business users no longer had to guess what legal needed, and legal no longer had to chase missing information.
“I took myself out for a celebratory coffee.”
— Effie Dower, VP of Legal
Now, business and legal users come to Coheso as the single source of truth. Instead of emailing one-off requests to legal team members, business users access legal through M42’s branded Coheso instance. From this legal hub, business users can submit and track requests and access self-service AI-powered responses. The legal team uses Coheso as its central workspace to manage all legal requests and for shared visibility across the department.
“Coheso has completely changed how we do everything. The transformation and implementation have been phenomenal.”
— Effie Dower, VP of Legal
Turning Vision into Adoption
M42 set out to build a legal hub that business users would not only adopt, but also enjoy using. Selecting a single, intuitive, and integrated point of contact between legal and the rest of the organization helped facilitate an easy onboarding process. Not only did Coheso enable easy onboarding and change management, but it may be the last change management exercise required for business users engaging with legal services.
To support the rollout, M42 identified internal business champions who shared feedback and input throughout the implementation. The response from business champions has been overwhelmingly positive. One person from the Clinical Education department shared that he “just loves it” and couldn’t believe he could receive an agreement within seconds of submitting a form. Though the implementation has led to some business user questions, such as “When did legal become the coolest function?” and “Can we set up intake for our department like this as well?”
Improving legal responsiveness became a key driver of business buy-in. With structured intake and automated workflows in place, legal was able to accelerate turnaround times on substantive requests. In addition, AI-powered self-service enabled business users to get instant answers with linked references to legal-approved documents. As a result, the legal team is responding faster, with less effort and greater visibility.
Coheso partnered closely with M42’s legal department to understand the company’s structure and adapt to M42’s complexity, deploying new features when needed to accomplish the team’s ambitious goals. This close alignment and responsiveness helped the platform feel intuitive and relevant.
“We are lucky as a legal team because we’ve been at the forefront of innovation in these processes. We’re seen as forward-thinking and are leading the way in how departments work cross-functionally.”
— Effie Dower, VP of Legal
Measurable Impact Shapes Perception
With Coheso, M42’s legal team has a single-entry point, structured intake, and clear routing. All legal work begins in one place and is managed with complete visibility.
Requests are submitted with complete context and automatically routed without business guesswork
Fields captured in Coheso form submissions are used to auto-complete CLM templates, allowing full agreements to be generated instantly and surfaced alongside the request when it reaches legal in the Coheso workspace
Coheso’s AI self-service tool provides instant answers to questions from business and legal users that require nuanced legal reasoning grounded in selected documentation
Legal tracks urgency, volume, and trends to drive better decision-making
Faster turnaround has helped shift how legal is perceived. Legal is no longer viewed as a bottleneck. With more transparency and shorter turnaround, legal is seen as a responsive, embedded part of the business.
“Legal is an integral part of the company. Anything we can do to move away from the perception that legal operates separately or acts as a bottleneck is hugely impactful.”
— Effie Dower, VP of Legal
Coheso brought structure to the front end, helping the legal team focus on what matters. The system reduces back-and-forth and supports better execution.
“Coheso has made our value clear. By making our process transparent and easy to follow, we help the business understand what we deliver and why it matters. When routine tasks are handled quickly and visibly, it creates trust and gives us space to do the high-level work that requires thought and care.”
— Effie Dower, VP of Legal
M42’s goal of freeing up time for more strategic work is now being realized, and buy-in across the organization has been a success. This is not by accident. Effie didn’t just implement Coheso for her team; she wants the whole company to feel like the system is built for them.
“The Coheso team has been brilliant—deeply responsive and truly thoughtful in how they incorporate feedback. Kudos not just to them, but also to my business partners and users. Everyone has played a role in making this a success. As the company and legal function have continued to evolve, so has my vision, and the Coheso team has worked incredibly hard to adapt alongside us. I’ve seen what great looks like in legal, and I genuinely believe we’re on that path. The progress since Coheso’s launch has been remarkable.”
— Effie Dower, VP of Legal
