Meet Ashlee Best, Legal and Privacy Operations Manager at Asana

Asana is a work management platform designed to help teams track and manage their work. The company’s legal team handles a range of responsibilities around the world. We recently spoke with Ashlee Best, Legal and Privacy Operations Manager at Asana, to learn more about her legal operations career and what advice she’d give legal operations teams at fast-growing companies. (By the way, that’s Ironclad Customer Success Manager Sara Lin backing up Ashlee.)

Tell us about your career in legal ops and in technology. How did you plan your career path?

I’ve always been drawn to technology and law; it seems I was destined to land in a role at the intersection of both! After graduating with a computer science degree from the University of Cincinnati, I worked for several technology companies with in-house legal teams as my “client.”

Typically, these legal teams were underserved by IT as they sought to implement efficient process and tools without any support or guidance from technology organizations. Now, 20 years later, the role is called Legal Operations.

What do the legal and legal ops teams at Asana look like (structure, main responsibilities, etc.)?

Asana has a tight-knit legal team. We cover corporate, international expansion, privacy, commercial, outside counsel management, budgeting, employment, information governance and product matters.

What are Asana’s main contracting challenges?

Pretty much none since implementing Ironclad! We’ve seen high adoption from day 1 and the main challenge at this point is keeping up with the demand to add more and more use cases into Ironclad.

How did Asana handle contracts prior to working with Ironclad?

Prior to implementing Ironclad, we relied on a manual process for handling contracts. In looking for a contract management solution, we were optimizing for a vendor who could help us streamline our contract management process, enabling us to be more organized, efficient and effective.

What workflows has Ironclad implemented? What have been the benefits of implementing Ironclad?

We began our implementation with our self-service NDA, followed by Professional Services, and our sales contracts (Order Forms). Next, we’ll launch a “Negotiated Master Subscriber Agreement (MSA)” as we work towards moving all our legacy contracts into Ironclad.

Since launching in April, we’ve been pleased to see high adoption of Ironclad across our sales organization. Thanks to this rapid adoption, we’re able to provide sales with approved contract changes, track standard and non-standard, integrated approval and signature routing, ensure the sales reps have the most recent contract template, and automatically store them in our cloud storage.

Any final thoughts or advice to other legal tech teams?

First and foremost, build your contract repository at the onset to organize all agreements in a single location. Clear communication is key: ensure that all stakeholders understand the goals and guidelines of the new process before implementing any automation and/or self-service tools.