When Email Becomes Your Enemy

Hitachi Digital's legal and compliance teams were drowning. Requests flooded in through multiple shared and distributed inboxes across subsidiaries—each one a potential dropped ball. Attorneys spent their days reactive and overwhelmed, with zero visibility into what was coming, what was stuck, or what had fallen through the cracks.

The pain wasn't just operational—it was strategic. Without a system to track volume, type, or status of work, legal couldn't prove its value, plan for capacity, or identify patterns that could drive better business decisions.

Meanwhile, hundreds of sales templates sat in SharePoint folders, organized by country. Sales teams regularly grabbed the wrong template, sent outdated versions, or simply gave up and emailed legal directly—creating more chaos.

“Email is a great tool, but email is not a system.”

Jeannine Moran

Director of Legal Operations at Hitachi Digital

The Solution: Building Hikari – Your Legal Guiding Light

Hitachi Digital found what they needed in Checkbox: a no-code platform purpose-built for legal and compliance teams to design, build and manage their own workflows.

What made Checkbox different wasn’t just the technology – it was the control. Legal could create the exact experience they wanted, embed AI-powered guidance directly into intake flows, and automate everything from triage to document generation, all without writing a line of code or waiting on IT.

They branded their Legal Front Door Hikari (光)—Japanese for "light"—symbolizing clarity and guidance. "Your Legal guiding light."  

“We were looking for something that felt more like an intuitive platform, something that was engaging and easy to use.”  

Jeannine Moran

Director of Legal Operations at Hitachi Digital

The platform delivered:

• AI chatbot-style guidance embedded directly into intake, answering common questions before they become tickets  

• Smart triage and auto-approval for low-risk requests based on predefined criteria  

• Intelligent document generation that selects the right template and drafts contracts instantly  

• Real-time dashboards showing volume, turnaround times, and trends  

• Complete legal ownership—no IT bottlenecks, no technical debt  

The Implementation: From 3 Workflows to 11 in 90 Days

Hitachi Digital started with a modest goal: build 3 workflows to test the concept. Within 3 months, they had built 11 applications spanning legal and compliance, plus AI Knowledge Agents embedded throughout.

Beyond the business-facing Hikari portal, the team also built an Internal Legal Hub—a secure space for legal and compliance teams to access restricted resources, tools, and information, all connected to Hikari

The secret to velocity: Learn-As-You-Build

To accelerate time-to-value and adopt proven best practices, Hitachi partnered with Harbor Global, a Checkbox implementation partner, to co-develop their first three workflows. Simultaneously, the Checkbox team enabled Hitachi's legal ops team through a "Learn-As-You-Build" program—transferring knowledge and skills in-house while building real solutions.  

This approach didn't just train the team—it sparked a rapid acceleration of ideas and execution that blew past initial expectations.

“We love working with the Checkbox team. They’ve truly been the best A-team: highly customer-focused, proactive in training and support, and always listening to our ideas for further product development. Their partnership has been phenomenal, helping us introduce this platform in a way that’s seamless and easy for our users to adopt.”

Jeannine Moran

Director of Legal Operations at Hitachi Digital

The Outcomes: From Reactive to Strategic

The global launch of the Hikari Legal Front Door built on Checkbox was met with strong adoption and business engagement, with impressive metrics across active users, workflow submissions, and AI Agent engagements.  

It transformed how Hitachi Digital's legal team operates—and how the business sees legal.

Visibility Replaced Chaos

No more buried emails. No more dropped tasks. No more hours lost recreating answers to the same questions. The legal team now operates through a unified front door with real-time visibility into every request, trend, and bottleneck.

Automation Freed Up Strategic Capacity

Compliance requests for gifts, travel, entertainment, and conflicts of interest now auto-approve based on predefined risk criteria—freeing the compliance team to focus on complex, high-value work instead of rubber-stamping low-risk requests.

The COI Disclosure Breakthrough: Making the Impossible Possible

The most dramatic proof of Checkbox's impact came with the annual Conflict of Interest disclosure requirement for Directors and above. Previously, this process couldn't even launch—the compliance team simply wasn't staffed to manually review a high volume of disclosures within the required 2-month window.

Checkbox changed everything:

Within 2 days of launching, 200 (of the 700) COI disclosures were submitted through Hikari. Of those:

• 88.9% were auto-approved by Checkbox according to configured business rules

• Only 11.1% required manual review—a manageable volume the compliance team could handle with conditions

What was previously impossible became not just possible, but efficient. The compliance team went from being a bottleneck to being a strategic oversight function, reviewing only the disclosures that truly required human judgment.

But the transformation went deeper than efficiency. Checkbox's instant analytics provided real-time visibility by:

• COI type — identifying which conflicts are most common

• Region/Country — spotting geographic patterns and risk concentrations

• Operating Company — tracking disclosure rates and outcomes across business units

• Final outcome — understanding approval rates and conditional approvals

These analytics transformed compliance from a reactive checkbox exercise into a proactive risk management function. The team can now track trends, identify high-risk populations, and target training and education where it matters most—before issues escalate.

Document Generation Eliminated Template Chaos

Before Checkbox, hundreds of sales templates lived in SharePoint, organized by country. Sales teams constantly used the wrong template or sent outdated versions. Now, document generation workflows in Checkbox select the right template and draft contracts instantly—no SharePoint, no confusion, no risk.

Legal Owns the System

Perhaps most transformative: Hitachi Digital's legal and compliance teams build, update, and manage everything themselves. No IT support required. With built-in dashboards and reporting, they track volume, turnaround times, and outcomes in real time—proving their value to the business while delivering services more efficiently.

“We started off with a plan to only implement three applications, and we ended up implementing 11 applications. It grew so quickly, naturally, and organically.”

Jeannine Moran

Director of Legal Operations at Hitachi Digital

The Future: From Cost Center to Profit Center

What started as a legal operations project has become something bigger. Other departments—vendor risk, marketing, business functions—are now requesting Checkbox solutions. Leadership is exploring how to turn Hikari into a cross-functional enablement layer, transforming a legal-focused investment into a scalable service offering across the broader Hitachi enterprise.

“There’s a line of people who are saying ‘We want a Checkbox application’ and now it’s something we’re looking to make into a profit center instead of a cost center.” Jeannine Moran, Director of Legal Operations at Hitachi Digital 

The roadmap ahead includes:  

• Expanded document generation across more agreement types

• Advanced approvals routing and signature delegation

• Moving away from static templates entirely toward a unified, automated, auditable experience

• Scaling the Legal Front Door model to new subsidiaries without reinventing the wheel  

As Hitachi Digital grows, Checkbox grows with it—delivering greater visibility, stronger compliance, and legal services that keep pace with a dynamic business.

What This Means for Your Legal Team

Hitachi Digital's story proves what's possible when legal takes the lead in building a modern service delivery model. With the right platform, you don't have to rely on IT to consolidate intake, streamline triage, or automate repetitive work. You can build it, control it, and scale it on your terms.  

The COI disclosure workflow demonstrates a critical truth: Some compliance obligations can't be met through manual processes at scale. When your team is understaffed for the volume, automation isn't a nice-to-have—it's the only way to fulfill your obligations while maintaining quality oversight.

Checkbox gives legal teams an intuitive, flexible way to reduce manual effort, improve visibility, and create a single, branded front door for legal. Whether you're just getting started or expanding your impact, you can move fast, show results, and grow at your own pace.  

Ready to see how Checkbox will work for your team? Book a demo to see how Checkbox can transform your legal team's service delivery.

“I had no idea how quickly we would be able to build something real. The opportunities are endless here. ”

Jeannine Moran

Director of Legal Operations at Hitachi Digital