“It turns out that it really is a simple as taking the first step and moving from there. We started working with SYKE three years ago and rather than trying to come up with a fully-fledged legal operations strategy from day one, we started small and scaled up. It’s important, in my mind, to not bite off more than you can chew when it comes to a project like this.
“We chose a handful of contract templates which were easy to automate and heavily used throughout the business, so we knew they would have a big impact. That way we could prove the value of the systems with powerful metrics and justify the time and expense involved in rolling out to more complex contracts and processes across the business.
“Today we’ve automated over 170 different contract templates, generating thousands of individual contracts a year, and 95% of contracts generated are now completely self-service. We have a robust legal operations strategy which is quite mature in our business and we’ve taken business users along the journey with us so that we have buy-in across the board.
“For the business the benefits are really obvious now. Users have access to the system 24/7 and the turnaround time is so much quicker. NDA drafting now takes approximately 10 minutes and involves no input from legal. We estimated in year one (when we were really only just getting off the ground) that we saved 24,380 minutes. That’s 50 days of saved human time which can now be spent on more valuable tasks – and that number is only going to continue to grow.”