The easiest and fastest way to get buy-in for AI is to use it for something that you hate doing—even if it gets you 10% further than where you would have been on your own, you’ll start liking it.
The best fitness programs and legal teams, as it turns out, both leverage technology, innovation and collaboration. Orangetheory is a boutique fitness concept with over 1,500 studios throughout 24 countries. The company has become a global phenomenon because of its unique heart rate-based group workout that combines science, technology, and expert coaching. Given Orangetheory’s trailblazing spirit, it’s no surprise that the legal team has embraced the idea of AI-supported legal operations.
Independently-owned franchises meant fragmented contract templates.
Orangetheory franchises are independently owned and operated, which creates a hyper-local connection between franchisees and their communities. However, franchise growth resulted in an overwhelming number of unique membership agreements. Charlene Barone, Director of Legal Operations & Strategy at Orangetheory, is spearheading the project to standardize the fragmented templates.
Significant expansion over time led our franchisee network to create upwards of 1,000 distinct membership templates. Our goal was to work with our franchisees to complete a wholesale consolidation of membership agreements in six months.
But manually consolidating 1,000 contracts would be a herculean effort involving a review of every single membership agreement against a master template in order to determine what needed to be added, changed, and removed.
Then, Charlene saw an email from Ironclad about the AI Assist™ feature and had an idea—what if AI could engage in the redline process automatically?
Charlene planned to use Ironclad’s Smart Import to upload membership agreements into a searchable format. Then, let AI redline each unique contract. But first, she needed to get buy-in from Joe Rubbone, Orangetheory’s General Counsel. She gave him a small demo of AI and got the green light to test her AI plan on a small scale. Orangetheory has franchises across all 50 states, and Charlene started with Texas—one of their largest markets.
The test went better than expected.
I told my GC that it would take a month to do. When I came back to him in a week, he was impressed.
Charlene’s idea to leverage AI for contract consolidation was unconventional, but the magic of AI is its adaptability, that’s bounded mainly by imagination alone.
Essentially, what [AI] is doing is redlining certain provisions for us. We have a set of specific terms that need to be in all of our membership agreements. Instead of manually redlining line item by line item, we identify the sections we want to update and then prompt AI Assist to do so.
AI Assist cut project time in half.
After the successful Texas consolidation test, Charlene worked on templates for the other 49 states. The Orangetheory team wanted to consolidate all 1,000 contracts in six months. Ironclad’s AI helped them do it in three. AI isn’t a magic solution that completely replaces effort, but as Charlene’s project attests, when used properly, it can save massive amounts of time.
“There were situations where it didn’t reflect the language we were looking for exactly, but I would say 80% of the time, it got us to where we needed. Which made us move a lot faster,” Charlene added.
Ironclad helps Orangetheory collaborate and create seamless customer experiences.
Orangetheory’s franchise structure and tech-savvy customer base create an opportunity to develop scalable, user-friendly legal operations. Here are a few other ways Orangetheory uses Ironclad to transform workflows.
Clickwrap improves customer experience and sign-up speed.
Previously, new Orangetheory members could complete nearly every part of the sign-up process on their phone—except sign a liability waiver. The six-page contract was a small but manual bump in the road that grew into a larger problem as more locations opened, more members joined, and COVID-19 created a need for a paperless experience.
So, Orangetheory implemented Ironclad’s Clickwrap to make signing the waiver as easy as checking a single box during sign-up.
We had a pretty aggressive implementation timeline and Ironclad beat the timeline by a week or two.
The Orangetheory community has embraced the new digital membership agreement clickwrap. “[We’re] running anywhere from 10 to 15% of our members through that channel, which is just kind of phenomenal,” Nick Devlin, Orangetheory’s Director of IT, noted.
Public workflows organize and simplify franchise collaboration.
“As a franchise business, one of our pain points can be getting the entire network of over 1,500 studios to sign agreements individually,” Charlene shared. Even a simple vendor change would previously involve multiple steps, reminders, and individual documents.
With Ironclad, the Orangetheory legal team now uses public workflows to save time for everyone involved. All the team has to do is create the agreement once and send a link to franchisees. Then, the franchises have an easy-to-use signing platform that automatically sends a confirmation to the Orangetheory team.
The cross-functional CLM improves collaboration.
Orangetheory’s creative use of Ironclad has had an unintended benefit—collaboration. After the IT team helped implement Clickwrap, excitement grew over how else the tool could help teams. “Once our IT team saw that we would be able to help them with their project, they were excited about being able to use Ironclad. It brought us together, and now I think we work better than ever because we have this common platform that we’ve all been able to leverage and benefit from. Now if we’re in a meeting and someone mentions signing documents, IT is the one to suggest using Ironclad,” shared Charlene. Charlene is eager to continue using Ironclad and AI to help Orangetheory’s legal team continue to save time and resources, especially after seeing its impact on the consolidation project.
I wasn’t worried about [AI] taking my job—I thought, yay! I can do more meaningful work now.
- 6 months to 3 months Contract Template Consolidation Time
- 1,000 Number of Agreements