How Glassdoor Automated 2,000+ Contracts with Ironclad Workflow Designer

Glassdoor’s legal team handles a number of different legal responsibilities. Automating thousands of high-volume, low-risk contracts (over 2,000+, as of right now) with Ironclad has helped the team stay focused on what matters. 

Background

Glassdoor’s legal team manages core legal matters for its online job listing and review platform, a website that has reviews for more than 900,000 companies in more than 190 countries.

From data privacy to contracts, employment letters to sales agreements, Legal has to be ready to respond to whatever business needs are most important. With so many areas to cover, the legal team has made a strategic decision to use technology to streamline routine contracts by automating common business processes around data collection, processing, and management.

The solution that helps Glassdoor’s legal team automate these processes is Ironclad’s Workflow Designer, the first and only code-free contracting tool that lets legal teams design and deploy their own workflows for contract templates, on their own and in a matter of minutes. With Workflow Designer, legal teams can create contracts on rails: workflows that enable business counterparts to kick-start contract processes and complex approval chains, without blocking on legal.

We recently sat down with Shane Riehl, Contracts Negotiator at Glassdoor, to learn more about how he and his team are using Ironclad to stay agile, empower their business counterparts to be self-sufficient, and implement creative solutions to difficult process challenges.

Problem

Glassdoor’s legal team faces the same fundamental problem that all legal teams do: the challenge of balancing many asymmetric risks and responsibilities.

Some of Legal’s challenges are relatively low-risk but also high-volume. For example, the team is tasked with collecting and processing release waivers for employees before those employees can use Glassdoor’s company gym. As long as Legal can collect and track those forms in a consistent manner, the company faces relatively low legal risk from that contract type.

The problem is that, unless properly managed, high-volume contracts can take up far too much of any legal team’s time. For example, at Glassdoor, the release waivers were originally collected on paper and stored at the company’s front desk. That made it difficult to locate contracts or hand off responsibilities around waiver verification (e.g., when employees wanted to access Glassdoor’s exercise facilities after business hours).

Solution and impact

With Ironclad, Glassdoor’s legal team has been able to streamline and centralize high-volume contracts. That helps the legal team turn manual, ad hoc contract processes into contracts on rails: highly streamlined, integrated processes that shepherd and speed contracts through each step of the contracting process, from request to repository.

Ironclad Workflow Designer is the first and only product that lets legal teams design and deploy complex workflows for their contracts, on their own, in a matter of minutes. It gives Glassdoor’s legal team the power to solve an operationally intractable problem without having to sink time and resources into implementation.

1. 1. From design to deploy, in less than two hours. Glassdoor used Ironclad’s code-free interface to design business processes for their contracts, without needing to sink time and money into implementation. It was as easy as importing contracts into Ironclad; tagging the document to collect any required information from business users; and publishing the workflow to business users.
   2. 8 self-built workflows enable Legal to be a hub for business processes. To date, Glassdoor has built and deployed 8 workflows that enable diverse use cases across its business units ranging from Marketing, Operations, Legal, and Sales organizations. This flexibility to accommodate diverse business needs enables Glassdoor’s Legal team to serve as a hub for business processes.
   3. 2,405 workflows processed, less time. By enabling business users to kick-start their own workflows, Glassdoor can process a higher volume of contracts with fewer resources. Further, Glassdoor’s legal team can now track contracts and documents in Ironclad, enabling faster and more efficient follow-up where necessary.
   4. Seamless integrations between contracting processes and existing technology. Ironclad integrates into Glassdoor’s existing technology stack. For example, it automatically populates consent information from Glassdoor and sends e-signature requests to participants using DocuSign. That means the Glassdoor legal team can get more out of the software offerings the company already uses.

Moving forward, Shane plans to use Ironclad Workflow Designer to standardize and centralize all routine contracts that need to be generated more than ten times annually. He anticipates that, over the course of a year, he’ll be able to automate several more contract types, meaning he will likely clear dozens, if not hundreds, of contract requests that would previously have come through email.

Says Shane, “Ironclad gives me the control to create workflows that make sense for the needs of the business when I need them, while also empowering the business groups I work with to take an active role in managing contracts to completion.”