The stereotypical image of an attorney is one crowded on all sides by piles of paper and books. The Nintex legal team can’t claim to be paper-free, but it is embracing the power of digital transformation to improve its support of the global sales organization and, by extension, improving the experience of Nintex customers and partners.
Nintex Legal is a small department that supports the global sales team from our Bellevue, Washington headquarters. Previously, the legal team relied primarily on email to receive requests for review of Nintex contracts – requiring the primary salesperson to provide the context of the deal from scratch for each new negotiation.
Given Nintex’s proven success in automating processes for the lines of business, the legal department was determined to use the Nintex Platform to digitize and streamline their processes.
Today, the legal review process is automated using Nintex Workflow Cloud and Nintex Task Forms (general availability coming soon). Automating internal legal reviews allowed both sales and legal to reduce the amount of time spent on administrative tasks, and still allows the Nintex attorneys to primarily use their preferred programs: Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Word.
Digital Transformation and In-House Legal Departments
At its most basic, the digital transformation of the legal department allows in-house counsel to do what they do best: practice law. When tasks are streamlined using an automation platform, in-house resources can spend more time on legal work rather than administrative processes. Every hour that is freed up for the internal legal team offsets work that might otherwise be sent to outside counsel.
By delivering better value, more quickly, with a lower, more predictable cost, process automation provides a measurable benefit to general counsel and management teams, no matter the size of the legal department.
This trend is exemplified by the rise of the legal operations function. Much like sales, HR, or marketing operations, legal ops drives the mandate to provide quality legal services for less by “developing more efficient and effective legal service delivery mechanisms throughout organizations.”
Productive legal ops not only creates better ways to manage the work done by in-house counsel, but also allows legal departments to track performance data and measure efficiency. Automation in the legal department, therefore, allows the legal department to get their work turned around more quickly and accurately – benefiting the entire organization.
Automating the People’s Process
Working with the Sales Engineers at Nintex, the legal department employed Nintex’s own technology to automate the legal review request process.
Nintex counsel determined the required pieces of information, the legal and sales teams mapped the workflow and, less than a week later, the review form and the workflow behind it was in production and ready to be used globally.
Today, when an Account Manager receives a request from a customer for contract modification, he or she brings up the ‘Nintex Legal Revisions Request’ form in their browser to kick start the review process.
When the account manager submits the form, a Nintex Workflow automatically sends an email assigning the review task to the assigned attorney contact. That attorney can then take one of three actions:
- Review, redline, and return the revised version to the salesperson.
- Approve the modifications, finalize the document, and return an execution copy to the salesperson.
- Delegate the review to another member of the legal team.
When a negotiation is complete, the attorney accepts all changes in the document, saves the execution copy, and resubmits the Nintex Form, having selected “Approve.”
This is where the power of Nintex Workflow Cloud and its ability to work with many systems of record really shines. Once a document is approved, Nintex Document Generation creates a PDF and saves it in two places: to a shared folder in Box that stores all contracts, and attached to the affiliated opportunity in Salesforce.
The immediate benefit? Saved time. Sales and legal partnered to deploy our own technology to significantly shorten the sales cycle and improve customer satisfaction. Further, Nintex attorneys can minimize administrative minutia and promote consistency, efficiency, and high-quality legal services to the sales organization.
Automating the internal review process is the first major milestone in the Nintex legal department’s digital transformation journey, and the capabilities of the Nintex Platform create the opportunity for many additional steps.
Interested in learning how to automate your own in-house legal processes using the Nintex Platform? Contact a Nintex representative today.
