At echo.legal, we want to bring legal technology to a wider audience by showing how we work with our clients, using document automation to create business results.
We have been working with a global consulting business on a major Contract Express project to make their systems work more efficiently for their internal stakeholders. Here’s our story.
A complex Contract Express implementation
This was a project to customise and implement Contract Express in a global consulting business. From the start this project was complex. There were a lot of factors to consider, from multiple service lines and complicated contracts, to getting engagement across seven different businesses.
The client project team had a clear vision for how they wanted to make the contracting process easier for users via one central source of truth. The challenge we faced was how to ensure the internal organisation could run and accelerate the project, at the same time as juggling the sheer volume of templates we - and the Contract Express system - would be required to map-out and process.
Project approach and outcomes
echo.legal came on board in 2019 as a dedicated document automation partner. As with all client projects, we invested significant time up front, to truly understand the business and to find out how they wanted the system to work for them. We then planned out how to bring this vision alive. Listening, hearing and understanding were key starting points, before working out how we could help execute the project.
Our document automation experts worked as part of the client’s team, reviewing hundreds and hundreds of templates, finding similarities and mapping out processes. The client has multiple departments that sell and cross-sell a huge number of products and solutions. This means that there were a number of generic structures and clauses that make up Engagement Letters, Master Service Agreements and Statements of Work. A positive outcome of this project was being able to keep the solution-specific wording in separate templates, managed by the solution areas. This tailored and relevant language is now pulled over into whichever main template governs the engagement. It means the business can add multiple solutions into their main agreements, using consistent language but also whilst retaining specific, applicable language for that area of work.
We also worked with the client to create other features such as a generating MSA and SoW at the same time, so that data can be reused. This means that contracting time is reduced.
Measuring document automation success
The project team from our client and echo.legal has now captured everything that the multiple service lines need. We have moved through a full iteration of this legal technology project, from production, development and user acceptance testing. Users are starting to generate templates and internal champions are being identified to harness buy-in from wider stakeholders. The team will be measuring success by reviewing how long processes used to take, compared to how long they now take. This is but one part of this business’ legal technology strategy, as they continue their digital transformation journey, working out continued optimisation, how to provide visibility for consultants into the full contracts cycle and ways to track information.
Our client’s project manager said:
“echo.legal has been hands down the most responsive partner we’ve ever had. When we have a question or we need to make a change of technical insight, they consistently respond within 24 hours. “
Their contract manager added:
“What was a real game changer was the echo.legal team offering to put together some training materials for how to use Contract Express. This was such an amazing resource for us. They empowered us by clearly laying instructions out and recording meetings. We learned so much. Their approach made us more confident and we now use those materials with our new starters.”
As always, it was a great experience working with a major international client to ensure their first experience of legal technology was a successful one, that paves the way for their future. As a next step, we will continue to work together to integrate Contract Express with their CRM system. As the famous song goes, we’ve only just begun….
If you are a law firm looking for support with your legal technology and document automation projects, from Contract Express to HighQ to Avvoka, Contact Us to see how we are able to partner with you.
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