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“Building on Checkbox is fun and efficient. It strikes a great balance between simplicity and power. It is possible to build complex things, and for easy things it is easy to build. It has been fun and rewarding to bring on more kinds of people as builders and see the ideas and apps flourish. It is in high demand!”
Challenge:
Align Technology is a fast-moving company and was in search of a legal tech tool that would help bring them up to speed with the rest of their organization. At the time, the Align Technology team was working with contract lifecycle management (CLM) software that did not provide the metrics they were looking for, nor was it user friendly, making it inaccessible to business users. With business users not able to self-serve, taking time away from their legal team to provide them support, the Align Technology team knew they needed to find a solution that would allow them focus on high-value work.
After performing a global assessment, the legal team identified one of the key issues they had was giving time back to their legal teams to focus on high value work. Upon meeting with a legal consulting agency, their legal team decided that low-code/no-code solutions were the best option for their department and Checkbox was presented as their ideal tool.
Not only would these solutions be beneficial to their team of lawyers who had high volumes of work to complete, but it would also be the most beneficial option for the future of Align Technology.
“It’s not going to be easy to retain talent if we’re not cutting edge and making the work easier,” said Julie Johnson, Senior Manager of Legal Ops at Align Technology. Low-code/no-code solutions presented an opportunity for Align Technology to not only stay ahead of the curve in their legal department, but also provided an avenue for their legal team to build meaningful tools without relying on IT, which is hard to get resources from.
Additionally, a pain point for Align Technology’s legal department was that their long, manual processes were an inconvenient roadblock for their business users. Their business users did not have the time or desire to go through tedious processes such as evaluating long handbooks to look for answers to their questions. As a result, the legal team knew they had to create an automated intake and triage process for business users to submit a legal request via a “legal front door” or access a self-help portal where they could include their frequently asked questions without consulting a lawyer. A goal for the team was to refocus Align Technology’s legal department on higher value, strategic work that required their expertise, instead of being a customer service center.
“We were in search of a tool that could be used as a portal so that business users could go in and self-manage their contracts from beginning to end, while providing the metrics they needed to do so,” says Johnson.
Solution:
The Align Technology legal team decided that the best option was to adopt a no-code/low-code solution that anyone could use. "Our approach has been let's go for a no-code, low-code solution where our non-technical users, who are not coders, can build meaningful automation and tools with platforms like Checkbox," said Ansel Halliburton, Counsel, Trademarks & Legal Ops at Align Technology.
The main project that Align Technology deployed when first implementing Checkbox was non-disclosure agreement (NDA) automation. A non-technical user of Align Technology was able to build an NDA tool which has reduced the time it takes to process an NDA from weeks to a matter of a few days. The team at Align Technology has seen impressive results using the Checkbox platform, leaving them more time to focus on strategic, meaningful work that requires their legal expertise. For example, before Checkbox, the legal team had to have several touchpoints on their NDAs, but now, only between 5-7% of those contracts are going out of the system for redlines, which has streamlined in-house legal processes like never before.
Outcomes:
Align Technology was able to deploy automation solutions using Checkbox in just a matter of months and achieved impressive results across their processes, especially through their automated intake and triage and NDA solution. Within the first few months, the legal team was able to draft 400 NDAs and reduce the amount of time taken for NDAs from several weeks to a matter of days. Another outcome that helped the legal team to expedite their automation initiatives was the ability to allow anyone in the team to build business solutions. "One of our non-technical users, with a non-technical background, was able to build an automated NDA tool which has reduced the time it takes for someone at Align to process an NDA from days or weeks into minutes," said Johnson.
Additionally, only 5-7% of all NDAs needed to be processed out of the system for redlining, which was another great result for Align Technology, creating less legal touchpoints for NDA review and allowing the legal team to focus on more meaningful work that requires their expertise.
Checkbox has not only streamlined the way Align Technology’s legal team executes NDAs, but it has also allowed their team the ability to service their global teams and divisions with Checkbox. Since adopting Checkbox, Align Technology has been able to see the cross geographical value the platform provides to serve to facilitate such collaboration and workflows. With Align Technology being a global company, creating a streamlined NDA process for their employees across the world is critical. Checkbox has made it easy for the international teams to share each other’s perspectives on the work they are trying to accomplish and identify any common pain points they share. The legal team has been able to create liaisons in LATAM and EMEA, who are able to view the applications, creating transparency and level team interactions internationally. “We have really been able to make this a global improvement process. We can share each other’s viewpoints and develop a deeper level of understanding than we could before. This is now a global improvement process rather than just a back and forth,” says Johnson.
The benefits of using the Checkbox platform have also far extended beyond the legal department. Checkbox’s sphere of influence has expanded into other business units such as litigation, risk assessment and communications.
The Future:
With legal innovation at the center of Align Technology’s legal department, continuously iterating on their current processes is also a top priority across the company. “We can be more of a shared service center or global governance center for more than just legal,” explained Johnson. The plan for Align Technology is to expand the impact of the legal department beyond just legal. With a forward-thinking team, and a drive to continue championing automation, the goal is to add as much value as possible to streamline business operations across the entire Align business.
Continuing to scale their success, Align Technology is planning to deploy various other applications in the coming months. For example, they are currently working on deploying seven different workflows to help automate corporate security workflows. Additionally, the team is working on automating material contract evaluation, assisting business users to determine whether their contracts are subject to legal review instead of having to read lengthy documents of purchase requisition policy or contract policy, through answering a simple series of questions.