What is a Legal Front Door

This is Summize's ultimate guide to the Legal Front Door
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If a front door acts as the gateway to a building, consider the legal front door as the primary interface between business users and your company's legal team. Also known as legal ticketing, a legal front door allows business users and colleagues to log legal requests, which are then added to a queue and triaged to the right person in the legal department. It may also redirect users to self-service content, such as shared documents or Q&A information.

Why is it Important Now?

The concept of a legal front door isn't a new one. Digital transformation is discussed relentlessly across all organisations, and a legal front door is a massive part of that. But until recently, it has failed to gain momentum. But with the pandemic reshaping IT and working habits overnight, businesses are seeking innovation to do more with less, from slashing costs to boosting efficiency.

Queries from commercial teams to legal are causing bottlenecks and a backlog in requests, impacting sales cycles and increasing legal risk, all with commercial users defining how, when and what they request from legal. These commercial queries contribute to mounting pressure on legal resources in an already stretched market.
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The Summize legal front door provides a single source of access, focusing on integrations within existing collaboration tools to maximise user adoption across the business. It provides an easy-to-use access point that is controlled and defined by legal. Workflows span every department, making contracts easily accessible across the organisation.
Traditional legal front-door solutions were built as a form or shared inbox to be managed by the in-house legal team. These solutions created commercial access points for colleagues or external clients, allowing them to submit requests via an intuitive form containing conditional logic before redirecting to self-serve supporting documents or triaging the request with legal.

A shared inbox is straightforward for colleagues to use, but it does lack some essential elements of the legal front door. As a legal team, you can forward emails to team members to assign the right lawyer, but that's where the workflow ends abruptly. It also does involve additional admin work to manage it entirely.

Using traditional forms allows the legal team to receive structured data about work requests, which enables them to trigger the appropriate workflow. But these workflows fail to gain momentum when users don't adopt the process accordingly. And they can't always be automated, leading to increased administrative tasks and less time for essential functions.
The Summize Legal Front Door should be integral to your Enterprise Legal Management strategy. By uniquely interacting with familiar collaboration tools, including Microsoft Teams and Slack, legal communication can be streamlined and centralised across the entire business.  

Plus, users can improve and accelerate their legal contract processes without changing how they work. Summize is an intuitive, dynamic solution for improving legal service delivery that the whole business will love.

“By providing an API tie-in with Slack for generating contract requests from the business, Summize provides a consistent channel and predictable process for the Legal team to receive and address contract requests, which often allows suitable auto-filled templates to be provided through the CLM without direct Legal team intervention… a true time saver on repetitive legal services!”.
Brandon Tatum, Managing Attorney.

How Does it Work?

The Integrated CLM by Summize uses Microsoft Teams, Slack and Word as the primary user interface. This unique approach to contract lifecycle management makes contract workflows relevant to the entire organisation, not just the legal team.

Summize helps commercial users to create and review contracts seamlessly, raise issues, submit documents and receive self-serve guidance, all within a Q&A chatbot experience controlled and governed by legal in the back end.
Summize’s allows business stakeholders to self-serve against a library of pre-approved and pre-designed legal templates and automated workflows.

Summize Review

  • A commercial user submits a request for a review within Microsoft Teams or Slack using the standard chat functionality. The no-code solution allows legal teams to configure their support to various use cases using automated workflows and organisation configuration.
  • Depending on the request submitted, self-serve workflows and guidance can also be enabled, requests can be triaged, and issues raised.
  • Using this one location for requests, the business creates a single source of truth. Summize helps with effective communication and tracking requests between legal and commercial users.
  • The request is completed, and the contract is stored in Summize's central repository.

Summize Create

  • The commercial user uses the Microsoft Teams and Slack chat functionality to create their contract from scratch by answering pre-set questions from their legal team.
  • This can be completed in under 5 minutes.
  • The contract is stored in Summize's central repository.
Summize integrates seamlessly into Teams and Slack to create a gateway to legal.
Improve and accelerate your legal processes directly within the tools you already use. The intelligent analytics track contract response times, negotiation cycles, request types, and statuses, allowing you to standardise your contract lifecycle management and automatically track critical information.

Streamlined Workflows

Summize's integration-first approach with Microsoft Teams and Slack as the primary business interface streamlines legal communication and workflows. The collaboration experience is designed for legal teams by our in-house legal experts, explicitly configured for your triage processes, workflows, contract clauses and contractual positions.

Faster Contract Cycles

Allow commercial users to self-serve on contract creation in less than 2 minutes and a first pass review in under 5 minutes, bypassing traditional bottlenecks and delays in the sales process. The integration-first approach to the contract process allows for a simple and intuitive user experience.

Improved Compliance

Improve contract compliance by allowing legal to set pre-approved questions and templates to ensure consistent ad visibility of contractual risk.

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