Yahoo automates legal operations to save time and reduce cost 

Yahoo’s move to automate thousands of workflows and process saw the company turn to ThinkSmart. Paul Hirner, CEO, ThinkSmart discusses the journey.

As an enterprise grows, so do the demands on its legal team and the inefficiencies, costs and dangers involved in using manual workflows scale up accordingly. It is no surprise that companies competing in tech sectors recognise this problem. They are constantly striving to achieve greater agility and productivity and work flow automation is key. Yahoo Legal is an outstanding case in point. It had thousands of concurrent legal ops workflows and processes underway all vital to the legal department and various business units. They needed a work flow automation solution that could save time, reduce friction, drive corporate compliance, ensure visibility and allow for auditing actions.

Business-critical solution

The Yahoo Legal team includes more than 150 legal professionals, addressing 30+ areas of the law on a 24/7 basis for a truly global corporation. Its general counsel employs a team of legal ops professionals to support process optimisation, budget management, outside counsel engagement, policy compliance, e-billing, contract management and more. Work flow and process automation was always a goal for this team. The ideal, business-critical solution would eliminate email, texts and other tools, expediting workflows and processes while also serving as an unofficial repository for requests, approvals and completed agreements.

Rapid development

Jeff Franke, senior director of global legal operations at Yahoo, reviewed many business automation platforms. But none met his team’s demands. ‘None were fully functional and easy to use,’he said. ‘There are good industrial-strength solutions out there, but those require extensive IT support and don’t allow for rapid development of new work flows by people on my team or others in legal. We need to be able to create and modify a work flow on the fly because policies, processes and templates change all the time. And we must be compliant.’

Reducing lawyer involvement

In 2011, at a meeting of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, I introduced Jeff to ThinkSmart’s Transaction Automation Platform (TAP) and demonstrated how to build a fully functional work flow in real time. He was impressed with its ease of use, flexibility, end-to-end process coverage and full integration with industry-standard electronic signature solutions like e-Sign from Adobe and DocuSign. He felt TAP would let his team implement work flows quickly, while reducing the need to involve its lawyers in any number of processes. At the start, Yahoo’s Legal Operation team worked with ThinkSmart to create a development roadmap for customising TAP to their needs. One early step was to define and test customisations of the user interface to enhance its friendliness and usability.

Customisation and immplementation

Jeff worked closely with ThinkSmart to extend TAP functionality to include “transaction management,” or the ability to add work flow-related notes that can be modified on an ongoing basis without impacting the auditability of requests and approvals, helping with SOX compliance. ‘Where we once relied on multiple, non-integrated processes and tools, with email often serving as the repository for requests and approvals, we could now manage all that easily in one place with user-friendly interface,’ he said of the project.

Accelerating engagement on time sensitive matters

Yahoo tackled a significant and complex process: creating an effective alternative to the spend authorisation process for engaging law firms. The company engages outside counsel hundreds of times every year and securing spend approval to help get them started involves financial and compliance requirements without time for delays. The existing approval process was too time consuming and did not offer a great way to store approvals for easy retrieval. Yahoo automated the entire process using TAP to identify a legal matter, create a budget, all while following the global authority matrix with easy access to approvals. TAP allowed fast routing and core approvals of key legal expenditures within an auditable, SOX-compliant process.

Freeing lawyers from dealing with NDAs

The Yahoo team also automated the manual process for securing a Non-Disclosure Agreement. Leveraging the TAP development environment, Yahoo created an NDA portal, covering 20+ countries and leveraging Chinese characters, that is used by hundreds of employees annually, but frees lawyers or paralegals from being bogged down in hundreds of transactions. Now, it is rare that a lawyer must touch an NDA. Users can initiate and complete the NDA work flow on their own from a link on an internal Yahoo website, and they track the progress of each NDA.

Faster

Yahoo has made the platform fundamental to its legal operations. ‘TAP has allowed us to save thousands of hours of costly staff time every time we use it. It also lets us engage faster and more effectively,’ Franke says. ‘TAP is a cornerstone of our legal IT infrastructure. It would be one of the first tools I’d implement if I was starting from scratch. It’s transformational.’

Source: Global Legal Post – Yahoo automates workflows through ThinkSmart

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