How Fitbit Deploys New Contract Processes in Two Hours with Ironclad

Fitbit is a leader in the consumer wearable technologies space. Millions of people rely on their devices to track health and wellness information like daily activity, sleep quality, and other wellness data, so it’s critical that Fitbit conduct user research, usability tests, and surveys with as many individuals as possible as it develops new products.

Fitbit relies on large-scale research to develop cutting-edge technologies. Of course, Fitbit research participants can’t participate in studies unless they sign an informed consent. Fitbit’s ability to innovate and release new products depends directly on its ability to recruit and process the required paperwork for research participants.

That’s where the company’s legal team comes in.

Many of Fitbit’s research participants take part in studies remotely. The type of consent form they have to sign depends on where they live, the type of study they’d like to participate in, and their age. For example, in studies involving participants under 18, parents have to sign a consent form before children provide verbal consent.

Fitbit needed a way to streamline and accelerate the burdensome manual consent process, which created significant legal and operational challenges, including:

• Limited resources to monitor consent forms. Fitbit’s legal department lacked the resources to create and track large quantities of multi-conditional consent forms to participants in a range of geographies. That meant that fewer participants could be processed for studies across the company.
• Cumbersome and slow participant recruitment process. Fitbit’s paper-based consent process led to research participants dropping out of the recruitment process.
• Research slow-downs across the company. There was often a lag in recording and tracking the status of individual consent forms, which led to operational delays in research.

Using Ironclad’s Workflow Designer, Fitbit’s legal team designed and implemented a workflow to track the status and consent information of all Fitbit research participants, streamlining the company’s consent process and removing the operational barriers that previously prevented Fitbit from conducting market research at scale.

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

1. From design to deploy, in less than two hours. Fitbit used Ironclad’s code-free interface to design complex conditionality into the workflow, 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. “It was easy to build and also easy to iterate,” says Emelita Hernandez-Bravo, Fitbit’s Head of Legal Operations. Adds Eric Lentell, VP of Legal, “Building wasn’t the hard part; it was defining the business process.”
2. 1,261 workflows automated in one year. By speeding up the consent process, Fitbit Legal is also able to process a higher volume of transactions–and with an average completion time for all contracts of under 10 days.
3. Integrating contracting processes with existing technology. Ironclad integrates into Fitbit’s existing technology stack. For example, it sends e-signature requests to participants using DocuSign. That means the Fitbit legal team can get more out of the software offerings the company already uses.

Having successfully automated and digitized their consent form tracking and signature process, Fitbit is already seeing the direct business impacts of their process improvements. The benefits of Ironclad at Fitbit have included:

1. Step-change business expansion. Ironclad has helped Fitbit expand its research capabilities and is powering the company’s ability to quickly conduct large scale studies with thousands of participants. Emelita Hernandez-Bravo, Fitbit’s Head of Legal Operations, said that before Ironclad, Fitbit “was not able to do this kind of health and wellness market research at scale without an army of resources. In other words, Ironclad enabled a step change, rather than an incremental one.”
2. Streamlined operations. Ironclad’s intuitive and comprehensive user interface have allowed the Fitbit legal team to shorten the software training time required for new Fitbit employees and reduced Legal’s back-and-forth with other departments on confusing or complex contracts.
3. Enabling Legal to be a mission-critical business partner. Rather than being seen as a business blocker, Legal is a business enabler. As Eric Lentell, Vice President of Legal at Fitbit, explains: “The R&D team proactively came to Legal because they knew we had the ability to create a solution for them using Ironclad.”