Sales performance automation for legal

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welcome to the pilot episode of go with the workflow where we interview world-class leaders in legal and experts in workflow automation to learn from their hard-earned experiences designing and implementing process automation to make work more efficient and more meaningful I'm your host Evan Wong and my day job is being the co-founder and CEO of checkbox and in my role I have the privilege of meeting some seriously impressive people who have both the Strategic mind and the ability to drive change and execute on workflow automation programs and what I realized is that there is such a wealth of knowledge in the industry that currently doesn't have a dedicated platform so our goal with this show is to bring those people who have been there done that and go deep on their stories have them share their wisdom on real practical perspectives and tactics and help you with your own Journey with workflow automation I'm incredibly excited at the lineup of guests we've prepared for you over the coming episodes you'll hear from industry Titans who have implemented workflow at companies like Netflix meta and Yahoo but as this is the first episode we wanted to cover some Basics and to help me with that my guest today is Dave Moore Davis spent the last six years deep on a variety of legal Technologies including e-billing and matter management contract lifecycle management and of course workflow automation he has seen many teams in his career go through their transformation Journey with workflow and when combined with his thoughtful and analytical mind Dave holds an impressive wealth of knowledge that I'm grateful to be able to share with you today on this episode you'll hear our take on what exactly is workflow automation what's really legal about it when we talk about it in the industry compared to Enterprise workflow where workflow automation fits within the broader legal Tech stack and how workflow automation as a product is different from workflow automation as a feature in other products such as CLM and matter management we address misconceptions use cases and some of the outcomes of implementing workflow Automation and lay the foundational knowledge for the rest of the show and with that I hope you enjoyed this episode so I've gotten Dave Moore uh Dave Moore Reigns from our team here at checkbox he's our director of sales in North America um but as you get to know him you'll realize that he doesn't come across as a sales guy at all um but you'll see that come through I'm sure in this uh in this session today but uh maybe Dave can you tell us a little bit about yourself what's your background how did you end up in workflow and I know you've spent quite a number of years working in spaces you know outside of workflow in the legal space as well so yeah tell us about a bit about your story yeah and nice to be described not as a sales guy I guess um I I've been in sales since I was 17 years old so yeah going on maybe 23 years now I think somewhere along the way I was introduced to cloud-based technology and I just sort of fell in love with it and I think maybe most relevant like I spent the last six years specifically in legal Tech and I worked with clients um all the way from maybe sort of media em size business maybe 100 million in Revenue something like that all the way up to you know some of your Global uh 100 companies some of the largest most sophisticated organizations out there and I just I learned a ton um working with those folks on projects that involve Technologies such as matter and spend management contract life cycle management legal hold and of course like the thing that we're here today um and and really the reason why I'm at checkbox today which is work Automation and really just fell in love with uh with the idea and and really had the most fun and and the most interesting work that I've done I think in my career so far has been around workflow automation so um yeah really happy to be talking with you today right and look throughout the sort of web series that we'll be doing we'll be covering topics from um sort of you know how to build the business case for workflow you know deep deep dives into specific use cases and getting really deep across the live cycle Michael from ideation through to change management at the other end in monitoring you know we're going to be geeking out on the details of of implementation and change management and maybe even getting the perspective from Clos and GCS around workflow automation so really we want to create the Hub um and the knowledge base and the expert sort of community around workflow um for for the legal industry but today um this session is going to be a bit 101 it's sort of like a lead-in introduction to workflow answering some of the most basic sort of questions that are still I think largely unanswered for many people in the industry and so that's kind of the conversation that that I'll have with uh Dave today now Dave maybe just to start off um given given that you have spent as you say more than six years in the space um how do you define workflow automation I think the phrase gets thrown around quite a bit in the industry people hear workflow a lot but when you ask them point blank what is it exactly I think people will struggle to Define it so how do you Define workflow automation yeah like surprisingly tough question to answer I would say so if I had a one line um definition of it it would it would be you know the use of technology to streamline and optimize business process but I think even as I'm saying that I'm going to myself like what a bunch of nonsense that sounds like to anybody listening right like I don't even know what that means and I think early in my career too I as I was at least with workflow as I was explaining it to clients I would use use cases and I would say okay so here's an example of a use case and still people walk away going oh okay so it's you know so it's a tool to provide self-service for ndas I got it or it's uh you know a way to submit conflict of of Interest or it's a way to you know onboard a new vendor and I'm going yes absolutely it's those things but it's also a whole bunch of other things depending on your internal business process and and sort of what you want to use the technology to help to automate and so I think maybe to answer the question I will use an example um talk about sort of some of the characteristics of business process and then help you to understand like that example how we how it's commonly done and how workful automation can sort of fit into that so um I've got a friend named Julian marketing for a uh an insurance company and insurance of course as we all know like highly regulated um everything uh marketing wise has to go through legal and so if Julie has an upcoming campaign maybe there's an event that uh that Julie needs to get some creative out into the marketplace to to ramp up press for the the event or you know there's some product launch or whatever the case may be Julie knows she has to pass that process that that creative through to Legal ticket approval and of course Julie's uh excited about this because she knows that this is probably not the top of legal's priority list um so you know typically how is this you know done um Julie has to you know put together the materials for her her campaign she has to pass that through to Legal somehow typically what we see in the past is that you know way back if you think about it I'm told actually uh that there was paper forms you would have a file clerk maybe passing things around from desk to desk to get the proper Authority and signatures um we've obviously progressed from there and now you have things like email and slack and still phone calls that you can use to facilitate some of that stuff and so you know Julia put that together she'll pass it through email um to maybe the right person or maybe a shared email inbox and there's some drawbacks to that um obviously it's a bit of a manual effort to you know type out the email is she putting all of the right things into the email that that legal needs to approve it is she attaching the right documentation um all of this is sort of an unstructured way of doing it and so that the drawback there is that all that data can't really be leveraged in sort of aggregate so that people can see what's going on there's a requirement or sort of like um uh I guess a requirement on on Julie to make sure that all the information that's going into that submission to Legal is the exact same information that's in the source system for her marketing campaign so she's not mistyping things and it can be really inefficient so maybe legal gets that and they say hey we actually we need some more information from you because we didn't get it all the first time um the other piece of it is that there's oftentimes poor resourcing so you know who's working on this uh from the legal side is that the right person to be working on it to get into the hands of that person uh very quickly and so there can be some resourcing decisions that that aren't made very well um in that situation as well and all around I think everybody's you know sort of concerned when you have all this email back and forth where's the visibility if I'm a person that's involved or some other stakeholder that's sort of maybe indirectly involved to the process how do I know where we're at and are we going to meet our deadline and so I think oftentimes businesses will create business process around these things which have you know certain characteristics we have business process right so that you can uh have a predictable result and that you have high performance out of the process and so um for that reason you know technology becomes a really really good fit um because processes have you know a sequential number of steps there's typically a timeline associated with a business process where there's an expectation there's an understanding of you know what resources that may be involved or required for that process and so again sort of adding a workflow automation tool Blends itself really well because the characteristics of workflow automation map really well to that you know based on logic and those types of things so if we go back to the example right um Julie's got her uh her content and her creative that needs to go to Legal maybe the process looks a little bit different adding workflow automation because you can design that process in all the steps and logic into a system and sort of offload the responsibility of Julie to know exactly what that process is onto the system you can design a form for Julia fill out where she knows like these are the required things that I need to put in the first time and and then it's illuminates that that back and forth and when you've got structure you know different from email or slack or teams some of these more sort of um uh unstructured uh open text type of um forums then that data can then be reportable you can leverage those attributes so if there's let's take an example maybe it's the size of the campaign maybe it's the region of the world where that campaign is being distributed so those attributes can be used for for routing purposes they can be used as part of an approval uh Matrix to make sure that you get the right approvals um you know signed off and and of course like there may be not in this example necessarily but there may be additional documentation that needs to be produced so there's a template and some of those attributes right go from the fields into the template automatically you can produce documentation with the help of a system as opposed to relying on somebody to go out and search for the right template and so um so that that situation now looks like hey I fill out a form or you know through integration the information goes into the form automatically that gets sent to a person um automatically the right person documentation can be produced even things like if there's some processing of the data to produce some sort of scoring system or some insight that will help somebody make an approval and um and sort of the outcome of all of that is that you get a business process now that's fast it's totally auditable um you get all of the right information you get visibility that you can provide to the stakeholders and anybody that might you know need to know what's the status of this and how are we doing with it and then you can take all that data and sort of bubble it up and and use that information to really look at your processes and and make uh you know improvements and and really you know get a lot better at process overall so I don't know if I did a wonderful job at explaining that but um but sort of you know workflow workflow Automation in a nutshell yeah yeah what's really interesting about your answer though is that you leaned into an example that for many legal um sort of departments looking at workflow um they tend to gravitate towards Contracting workflows which makes a lot of sense I think a lot of the low-hanging fruit the sort of most obvious use cases sit in self-help Contracting I think you use the NDA as an example but with your example of jewelry just then the example that she was going through it was a lot more sort of business process wasn't it and and sort of you realize that workflow as a concept of workflow automation as a as a tool is kind of like the the plumbing or the Swiss army knife of legal Ops where you can really use it as a way to patch up a lot of the manual processes in the and actually it's the it's the connectedness between legal and outside Council other parts of business each other you know the business clients Etc it's very much the interaction layer almost um whether it's approvals or documents or advice or getting information that I took away from from your kind of um description there yeah like as far as analogies go right a perfect way to describe it I like to think of it oftentimes as almost like a vehicle or a transit system whereas before somebody's just sort of relying on on their knowledge of you know oftentimes companies will put a standard operating procedure somewhere on a shared site no one's going to that shared site like we like to think that we have control of these things like we rely on memory a lot um we rely on people just manually doing things and so when you can put this thing that can operate outside of that somebody says you know click a button and pass this information over here and by the way while you're doing it do these other two processes um that have to take place that maybe aren't even in my department right that just provide visibility or kick off these other things that need to happen and do it in an automatic way where you don't have a human being having to to focus on that it's just a a wonderful thing to to be able to provide that sort of speed and efficiency and really help to take um I think especially for the folks in legal you know that process with that I was talking about with Julie and and probably a whole host of other processes that are coming to your minds as you as you're listening uh from the audience perspective right now you have things that are really high value like high strategic value for the organization high risk that that are priorities for you and then you have all these other things and I've heard it like you know I when I get this type of work close to the bottom of my pile um probably the right thing to do right um you know as your responsibility to the business but to the person that's requesting it that's really important for them to get done and so it does have to be done and here's a way that you know you can you can leverage a piece of technology that helps everybody to get them what they need faster and and to remain a really great partner to the business in that way but also focus on the things that like you went to to school you know for probably a fairly expensive education you've got really high skill set um allow you to work at sort of the top of your skill set and licensure and really focus on the things that matter for the business strategically yeah absolutely and we talk about workflow a lot and workflow being you know sometimes when when legal teams um look at workflow um they get really excited about it and eventually it hits this point where they're speaking with it of course because it's really important stakeholder for us to to get on board when we when we look at vendors and then it says well workflow automation that shouldn't be a legal thing that's a that's an Enterprise consideration have you kind of come across that before in in your time sort of working with workflow over the last sort of six years or so Dave particularly in the legal context where the legal is championing workflow and how it kind of intersects with that what's been your experience yeah I think certainly you've got all over the business there there are Technologies um you know and you've got some overlap with you know some things that this department wants to do and something that legal wants to do I think that um with workflow Automation and you know there is it did find a home I remember hearing this early on when I first heard about it it was it was like it wasn't designed specifically for legal um it got it found a home in legal because it was such a natural fit I think based on the characteristics of the type of work that legal does right it's it's it's risk it's very logic based oftentimes there's a need for auditability and these types of things and uh there's you know document creation oftentimes involved and so I think it just it finds a natural fit I mean I don't know what what are your thoughts on why it's you know more of a legal than an Enterprise I.T thing I think about this um quite a lot and and I've really drilled it down to I would say three well first of all I think I should acknowledge I think workflow automation is in fact an Enterprise concept the reason why legal work for automation or particular tools like checkbox are specifically designed for legal it really comes down to three things right like the first thing I think you mentioned it's around legal processes tend to be a lot more logic based and I say that because when you compare that with other types of workflow automation tools as an example like zapier or wakado um you know these tools are very much system orchestration right they're still workflow automation but they're automating the workflow between systems as opposed to between people that are typically doing some sort of intake some sort of approval um and so it's it's the type of workflow automation I would say it's like an umbrella term legal workflow automation kind of fits as a subcategory to meet the use cases of and the processes of of legal I think there's certain you know metrics like cycle times that's very important to legal right often we get thrown under the bus around turnaround times you know we might work on it for one hour send it over to the counterparty and they take two weeks and to the sales rep we took two weeks in legal right of course we didn't but you know there's no visibility in metrics and particularly the cycle time not just from start to end but sort of segmented by the different parties that play a role in in the overall sort of end to end and so I think there's a lot of metrics there's there's types of you know processes that really lean into legal as a department that is actually quite unique from our friends over in say HR or um or or it who traditionally work with systems and not necessarily you know the interaction of people across the across the organization but but the second big thing is I think the focus on Contracting because again if you look at a lot of these Enterprise workflow automation tools that are a bit more logic based they still typically don't have the Contracting component because they tend to serve um you know other departments that are outside of legal the unfortunate truth is uh legal often gets underserved right and so I think legal work for automation specifically has a focus on uh you know document review document Generation Um it's native to these systems as opposed to having to try and Cobble something together and integrate it right so it's it's that kind of focus on self-serve Contracting that that centricity around contracts um and then I would say the third and last thing is more of a more of a point around time to Value which is your legal Focus workflow automation tools tend to have your Integrations with the rest of the tech stack your legal Tech stack right so things like your e-billing your CLM your matter management um you know etc those typically come already as part of the library which means that you don't have to spin out separate it integration projects related to that is the idea of templates so again these workflow automation tools will come with templates so you don't have to start from scratch you already have that base NDA template or the base conflict of interest or the gift register and and so what that allows you to do is not just take an IT system which typically feels very I.T and then have to get it people to then code and customize before you get to your sort of launchable product um it's it's much shorter and much easier and uh and and typically is no code so the legal department can also sort of maintain and configure themselves so you know it's it's an interesting point because I think like work for automation I.T legal that they tend to kind of sometimes uh Clash worlds but uh when you look under the hood there's a lot of uh specificity that comes with them a tool that's built for the industry yeah I I totally agree with that I think it might it might be changing a little bit I think I think it isn't is starting to show a little bit more love to legal as legal is starting especially with tools like this right it's uh they're starting to demonstrate um that it's not that historical reputation I think that a lot of that I've just heard over my career is that people want to get away from it's like a cost center or a bottleneck or what have you um I hear all the time uh legals finding ways to demonstrate how they are impacting Revenue how they're enabling the business and and this is one of the ways that they can do that absolutely and I say that I see that as well as a big part into the database I mean we talked a lot already about the um so the efficiencies and and sort of going from manual to automated but there's a whole entire a lot of layer that kind of wraps around once you start to bring things from you know the the more manual methods and I'm not talking about necessarily paper-based I'm talking about things that might to your point just be email slack and teams where that you know communication that data isn't captured in any way there's there's no business insights that come out of it but when you start to shift these processes um into more structured formats then you start to also get the dashboard and the analytics and the reporting around you know um uh how often are we getting certain types of work what other types of work which departments are coming to us more frequently and are there any bottlenecks actually in the processes that have been designed that actually allow us to free up that efficiency in the business but also again be able to demonstrate that value to your point that that level has in the organization um so I think yeah that's a really interesting point you made yeah the analytics piece is probably the most interesting to me because it's so strategic but I I think that there's a few different things that I look at like one is sort of that that tactical piece which is what's coming in and what's the volume of how much is coming in and how are we allocating it and how quick are we getting it done um I think that there's a there's sort of a reputational piece to it as well so when you were talking about hey it came into us and we sent it back and it sat with a counterparty for two weeks and I've heard stories where you get you know a deal that goes south right everybody wants to point the finger at legal ah look at this and so but hey we have the data now um no no it's your point it sat with the counterparty for two months at a time uh and the whole thing lasted you know a year long and and that's how it got lost it wasn't us we were turning around an average of two days or something like that so there's that risk to sort of the reputation management piece of it um and then that third piece I think is really interesting too which is not just like how quickly can we turn around work but the ability to go in and and look at process and say hey we could see the Milestones between when things are happening like where are we getting stuck and do we need to go and deliver some training to the business or do we need to optimize like the product we need to go in using this low code tool as a business user and say if we just eliminate this step or if we added this field we get this piece of information earlier and we can actually improve this process and and then go back and demonstrate to the business hey look how much time we just saved this is or look how much money we just saved um you know through efficiency and gains really powerful stuff so absolutely and and and you've spent you know obviously a lot of time in other systems as well um sort of what what do you say and I I have my thoughts too but I'd love to hear yours first like where do you typically see workflow automation as a technology fit within the broader legal Tech stack I think you know today um a lot of people when they think about legal technology and sort of the first place they go is either you know sort of a billing where they're trying to get some efficiencies on on outside Council spend or they might look at CLM which which seems to um dominate a lot of the conversations at conferences and things like that but you know workflow automation you'll hear here and there you'll hear it on panels you'll hear certain people are on their Journey get a lot out of that but where does it exactly fit if we were trying to create a mental model um for for workflow so that people when they're when they're sort of Designing that Tech stack where do you see it kind of fit into that Tech strategy in between and everywhere I think that uh you know I wouldn't pretend to tell a business which is the most appropriate uh for them to do first I think so if you take a look at your your overall Spin and it's pretty darn low and you're using um you know a small group of vendors right um do you is is ebilling going to give you like the the biggest gain compared to maybe you've got lots of of process and a high volume of requests is that going to be better than workflow I don't know oftentimes what I've seen is that e-billing can have a huge uh return on investment right so there's Big Time Savings to have there and it's it's an awesome technology but um workflow can be a an amazing companion to that so as you think about how you're interacting with your vendors maybe there's some information that you want to capture with them maybe there's a certain way that you need to engage with those vendors and um and you can leverage a workflow tool in combination with your e-billing to get further value out of it I think maybe that's the point um that that's really misunderstood but like maybe not emphasized enough um in our discussions Evan it's like this tool not only is going to give like this the workflow automation tool it's not just going to give you your efficiency gains from the processes that you automate but it's also going to enhance the value of your other tools so I don't ever think of it as a you know should I get e-billing or should I get matter management or should I get CLM versus workflow I I see it as get workflow and get those other things too and whatever like you know step that you need to take in terms of a technology selection first do it with workflow because you can get a lot of information and you know I've worked with companies where they said here's the honest truth we don't know what everybody's doing okay and it's scary thought but until we figure that out we don't know where we want to invest in technology next or in people next right so we we need to figure this initial piece out provide some sort of intake and understanding of what's the volume and what's the type of work and how are we spending our time before we go out and and invest further in technology so it's a long way to answer but I think like in between and everywhere um is where I see it fitting yeah I like that answer because it it shows that you're sort of focusing on business value and what is the problem to be solved here right because there is no one answer for all departments it really depends on you know taking a diagnostic approach and and seeing what sort of um works for you but I think like to your point like workflow being the plumbing aspect um I agree with by the way I think it's like a very useful tool that's sort of agnostic in a way to any particular like that's interesting about workflow it's agnostic to any particular use case which is why it's so flexible to really connect all of the different parts of your of your Tech stack and the Enterprise Tech stack and the sort of people that that wrap around the systems as well um I tend to see a as having two other roles by the way so so sort of there's the plumbing aspect that you kind of alluded to but but also one that's really emerging um over the last few months that I've I've seen in in just almost every conversation I've had is the front door um and I think you mentioned intake a little bit there but it's really the concept of the front door and it's the experience of how does the business interact and and sort of request um help from legal and workflow has really emerged as the kind of technology to address that particular um that area because of how flexible it can be in designing those experiences um and so that's that's what I've seen um another key role of workflow it's like how do you design that top layer interaction between legal and the business then you have sort of the plumbing that you talked about but then the third role that I've uh that I've that I've always known workflow for actually initially is really around the self-help tools um that sit at the back of the plumbing so it's almost like your catch-all for the rest of the use cases that don't actually fit well in any of the existing systems right so if you've ever come across like a process that you want to really improve but you're like it doesn't really get solved by CLM because it's not really Contracting or maybe the the the um maybe like the the design is is is uh not flexible enough or maybe it's it doesn't fit with your say e-billing system or Elm Etc often what happens in those cases is workflow is a good is a good solution to those sort of you know tidbit use cases all over the place that don't fit into your kind of existing Tech stack and so so you know it is your self-help maybe NDA for the more straightforward um sort of Contracting use cases but it could also be like your like where would you fit a contract a conflict of interest use case like it doesn't really fit in any of those traditional uh pieces of the of the tech stack so work for automation is is catch-all so I would say it's like the front door feeds into the plumbing the plumbing then has either on the on the endpoints you know you're e-billing your CLM your actual lawyers who may need to work on the Strategic work but also you might have a a suite of self-help tools um or approval processes that's actually powered by the workflow automation platform itself yeah it's and it's funny too because what I've seen companies do with this those processes that you're talking about they're everywhere um and you see it happen with companies and like sort of the light bulb goes off and they'll say well we initially brought this in because we had these five right initial processes we we thought these are like you know things we need to solve for right now okay but then uh you know they they start to get and they go oh wait this could be good for that and then somebody else that interacts with that process goes hey what are you guys doing with what is that thing we need that and then it just sort of I've seen it go viral where you now you've got processes that are being handled by work automation that are even going Beyond legal and they're going into HR and they're going into some of these other departments where they can be really value maybe it's still touching legal uh you know to some degree but maybe they're not even the process owner anymore and it's just sort of spread because it is that thing that can fit in between where it's like ah you know maybe there's a system out there that handles that one thing but I don't want to buy a system that you know I have to go in I gotta you know go through all my approvals I gotta get budgeted I have to have i t you know um build it out and go through this big configuration implementation process I have this thing over here that fills that Gap so nicely and I can build it myself like that's you know that's where we start getting excited and seeing companies really really Excel and get like maximize their value out of a tool like this I've seen organizations I mean I've seen legal departments specifically become the champions of of almost transformation um through workflow because of that um the visibility like it's it just has so much visibility to the rest of organization because of how outward facing it is um so that that totally resonates I've got one last big question for you this is a challenge this might be a challenging one uh Dave but I'll throw it at you anyway um workflow automation we talked about the phrase being used a lot in the industry and we hear a lot here and there and maybe part of the confusion is because workflow automation is a category in of itself as a technology category but it's also sometimes a feature of some other categories like you might hear CLM talking about having workflow automation or matter management having worked for automation I think that kind of that kind of creates a little bit of confusion there I'm not saying that they don't they they do but I would love for you to clarify like how do you how do you see the difference between like a workflow automation platform versus like work by automation as a feature in some of these other tools yeah so I think I think you are right a lot of tools have workflow um included in them uh even in the ones that we've been talking about CLM uh matter and spend management um some of those tools have an element of even low code workflow automation built like within them right um I think that the key difference is that and maybe there's two um one is I think licensing so like the commercial structure of how workflow is commonly sold and I think the second one which is probably the more important one which is user experience so the licensing one I think is is easier to sort of cover um with no code workflow automation you know it's it's not a per seat license right so whereas with matter management e-billing with CLM systems right you have um you know a per seat license that means that if you have a workflow that needs to go out for approval to your Finance team um before that contract can get out the door or whatever the case may be they need a license to and um you know you may be able to make use of some sort of limited privilege at a lower cost but even then you're still managing a license for a user and they're you know getting them on board in their profile and so on um and so so there's a licensing piece and then I think the the other piece which again is I think more important the user experience piece which is um with those systems workflow let's imagine that I'm uh a person that's part of a process right I'm not in uh Elite I'm not on the legal team and so you know if I'm let's say it's matter management related so there's Elite there's some legal dispute or there's a matter um that I need to weigh in on or provide approval or provide input or whatever the case may be if I want to use the workflow in that system I'm now looking at you know going into that system specifically in order to um you know provide my input or intake some information that allows me to make an approval or decision or what have you and so and there and so and there may be multiple of those so I may be participating in a matter management system but also CLM and also in e-discovery and so on and so now I those are three different systems that I have to learn and and at least from from what I've seen most of the time that means that I'm looking at a screen that wasn't designed for me both in terms of How It's laid out but also the language that's being used I'm not you know I'm not a legal person so you know if I'm looking at uh I'm trying to think of like a really good example but let's say I'm looking at a contract and someone's asking me you know do we need a warranty class it's like well I don't know what a warranty Clause is but you could ask that question differently like does the do we need to know that the person that's that's discussing information with us has the right to discuss that information because we're going to be using it in some other way it's like that's more of a business way to ask the question do we need a warranty Clause you can create an experience with workflow that really meets a user and enter layman's terms as simple as possible communication style you can create an experience where they get an email for their part of the workflow that has a link in it and you click on that link and it opens up to a page that's got just the information that you need to do your part not like every screen that's available within a record within a matter of mentioning but just the part you need and that allows you to have an experience as a user that requires absolutely no training um it's the same as any website that you've ever been to in your life there's an instruction click this box or answer this question or here's where you input this information and you hit submit and it goes on to whatever the next sort of experience is and so I think sort of like the non-training part the non-uh you know being able to see things in your language that are catered like the experience catered to you and then not having to to like find your own way to log on to something you know if you have a matter management system and you're working with your outside counsel you either provide them a login or you have a tool that's capable of going beyond the bounds of of your system to even external parties parties external to your to your company for them to be able to participate in that sort of workflow tool can do that in a way that uh that doesn't require them to to create an account and you know again sort of train on the product so I think it just it really comes down to user experience yeah I um I was told by someone a few weeks back um it's very similar to some of the insurance website products you go on and you're trying to figure out what insurance products right for you and the user experience is in those tools are so limited to exactly sort of the question that you need to be asking yourself at that point in time with the information that you need and there's really nowhere you can go wrong with kind of just clicking through answering questions and you kind of let the system that's hidden behind like guide you to the correct point and and I think that's kind of the point you're making around the the user experience which is you really can't go wrong with it like there's it's almost like it's it's a tool that doesn't even need training for the end user because because it's so restrictive in exactly getting them to do what they need and what you want them to do being able to launch out of different sort of entry points as well I think is a very interesting point like again going back to the point of um interfacing with the business being able to embed within your existing CLM right like you don't have to launch necessarily out of workflow tool you can embed workflow throughout all the systems that you have and meet the users where they are I think is uh is another another key part of um differentiation really huge that it that it's so easy to integrate with other things because ideally you wouldn't see a form at all right if I'm in if I have all my information in salesforce.com why not just have the ability to say package this stuff up and send it into that form behind the scenes um you know the form is easy right it makes it easy for somebody without the training but if you've already got data in another system right take the take the the data risk out of play altogether and integrate it where possible but I I totally agree with your point like it's the lack of of training it's the idea that somebody can get in and use it day one and know exactly what to do because it's in line with other experiences that they've already had it's the the user expectation with others software that they already know how to use is built right into it so yeah I agree amazing fantastic well that's uh that's a really good start I think to the uh to the series um I think we've covered some fantastic points and some foundations and probably cleared up a lot of uh maybe misunderstanding or perhaps open questions around workflow before we dive into all the guests that we'll bring on board and on that note Dave I'm really excited for the the upcoming sessions we're going to have uh you know directors of legal Ops from companies like Netflix and Spotify and meta and netapps um and uh people have really been there and done that with workflow uh so I'm really excited for the upcoming sessions um like I said we'll be covering topics from not only how to build the business case but right throughout through um to implementation and down to specific use cases and going really really deep so I think this has been a great sort of overview um sort of pilot episode but we'll be definitely getting much more deeper much more tactical and action orientated with with coming sessions with all our of our friends in the workflow automation space thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of go with the workflow if you found it valuable you can subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app like Spotify or apple podcast also please consider giving us a rating or leave a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast too that's all for now so we'll see you at the next episode [Music]