One of the things we regularly see legal teams grapple with is when to put their legal automation solution into live use.

Having done the hard yards of reviewing and refining their documents and the process, having it automated to a high standard, and having done a fair amount of testing within the legal team and with some key users, there is often a feeling that still more needs to be done before setting it live.

I’d encourage you to consider the benefits of putting it live earlier.

How LawHawk approaches putting solutions live

I’ll tell you how we go about approaching these things in practice. For context, see the solution below as an example. 

It's a fairly simple workflow where a user can create a draft contract via a form in SharePoint, review and approve the draft, and have it signed in AdobeSign before it is returned to a SharePoint contract library.

Where only a small group uses the solution

Often, the solution is not actually used by a wide number of people. In that case, it is usually relatively easy to involve those frequent users in discussions about the design and testing of the tool so that if they do have any concerns or issues, they can be dealt with easily at that point.

Then, when you feel it is ready, invite those people to contact you the next time they need to do the process, and offer to sit with them on a video call and hold their hand while they do it.

You can record the call so that they can refer to it – or show others - if needed, but it gives them comfort that if something doesn’t work as it should have, you can immediately step in and fix it for them in real-time before it becomes a more significant issue.

Having done it once, they often don’t require any further help. They become confident users very quickly and are huge advocates for the solution because it is likely saving them a lot of time as they use it a lot.

It also gives them the confidence to get in touch more regularly if they can see further improvements that could be made to the solution or other processes that could do with similar treatment.

Where there are many users

It’s a bit more complicated when you have a self-service solution intended to be used organisation-wide. In that case, it isn’t possible to do that personalised level of induction. Here’s what we have done in that case.

Videos to show what will happen

To try and remove some of the uncertainty and fear that users may have, we sometimes include a video embedded at the top of the solution, showing them how it works and what will happen. You might need to record this a couple of times if things change in the solution because of learnings from live use, but if you keep it simple, that’s not too hard, and it is worth it.

Keep an eye on submissions.

I also monitor submissions to begin with to check that it is being used and how it is being used. If I see something wrong, I can contact the person immediately and put them on the right track.

If there is an ongoing workflow, such as the need for approvals or digital signing, I can also reach out to the user and let them know that I am there to help them at any stage if anything goes wrong.

Assuming things continue to go well and there aren’t apparent issues arising that can be quickly fixed, I don’t need to reach out proactively. Instead, I will often monitor the workflow and look for any runs with issues, which I can investigate to see what went wrong and then step in and fix. Sometimes, I don’t even need to let the person know this has happened. If they know I have stepped in, they are grateful for the help.

It's not only when there are technical errors.

Even when there is no error in the process, people will often not behave as you anticipate and hope they will.

As one example, we recently set live a Cognito Forms/Microsoft Power Automate/AdobeSign solution where people across the organisation can generate independent contractor agreements on the latest template, review and approve the draft, and automatically send it to AdobeSign to get the agreement signed more quickly and ensure documents and data are all stored in one central location.

Because we didn’t want to force digital signing on people, we gave them the choice to say yes or no to using digital signing.

Almost all of the submissions coming through chose not to use digital signing.

To counter this, I added a video to the right of the question, saying, “Watch this video to see how AdobeSign will help you save time!”.

This helped, but people were still selecting No.

So, I added another question to the form, which would only display if they chose not to use digital signing. The question is, “Tell us why you have chosen not to use AdobeSign now. Your feedback will be used to make improvements to this tool and address any challenges.”

Initially, I made the question optional and found that many people chose not to complete it. So I made it mandatory.J

At that point, people started to enter details of their concerns holding them back. Often, they were easily resolvable, so I could start addressing their concerns on the screen. For example, the question about whether they want to use digital signing now has guidance underneath that reads:

“If you choose yes, you'll be emailed a link to the document to check and approve before it goes into digital signing. 

You'll be able to edit it first before approving it, if edits are required.

If you approve it, from there it will be an automatic process where each person that needs to sign will get automatically notified and reminded. When signing is complete, you'll all automatically get a copy of the complete signed document and it will be automatically saved too.

It is likely to save everyone a lot of time.

You don't need a separate AdobeSign licence for this - that's all taken care of.  “

This addresses concerns about wanting to see and check the document before it goes to signing, and licensing requirements.

It can be simple and iterative.

None of the steps above have been particularly difficult or time-consuming for me. They have taken far less time than required to do endless rounds of additional testing and thinking about everything that could go wrong but probably wouldn’t.

By putting the solution live, we could start helping the majority of people get much better outcomes than they currently were while also identifying the problems that could be fixed and fixing them very quickly.

The risks are usually very low.

Most of these processes are not the most important thing in the organisation and are not very high risk. Without automation, they are most likely being frequently carried out to lower quality standards anyway.

If the odd one doesn’t work perfectly the first time, it’s really not a big deal to intervene, put it right, and quickly rerun it.

I’d encourage you to consider a similar approach in your own projects, as you will make much faster progress and get a return on investment much more quickly. If you’d like more details about how you could do this in your organisation, get in touch. I’m happy to give you more specific suggestions relevant to your process.