CASE STUDY

Our organisation needs access to templates

With a team of 5 lawyers servicing more than 550 personnel, this small local government legal team wanted to create a range of self-service, on-demand legal templates to help their colleagues faster.

The Problem

This legal team received frequent requests from the business to create legal documents.

Typical requests ranged from contracts for services through to property documents such as leases and licences.

The lawyers took, on average, 2.5 hours to locate a prior example and tailor to meet the specific requirements.

The challenges included:

  • the team had no existing template bank

  • the lawyers had a range of samples from different panel firms, in a range of styles, no consistent signing blocks, inconsistent definitions and confusing user guidance

  • lawyers were not confident to share sample legal documents unless they handled them to check the law was current, the layout was re-formatted and the content was tailored. Every time, for every request.

  • council officers wanted to access low-risk legal documents as needed, when needed but had to raise a request every time

The demand for legal support was increasing week on week. The team needed a way to assist their council colleagues to access legal documents as needed, when needed without a wait for a lawyer.

New Plymouth District Council asked me to help to build a suite of on-demand, self-service templates.

I worked with the team for 5 months to solve this problem and create a new, on-demand template bank for the most frequently requested legal documents.

The Process

  • Audit The legal team provided me with samples of contracts + property documents. We reached 120+ documents!

  • Assessment Next I performed a service review to assess which templates could be released as self-service. We agreed on 25 templates.

  • Standardisation Working with the communications team at NPDC, I created a brand standard to create a consistent layout for all templates. This was documented into a template standards manual.

  • Review and Refine A nominated lawyer was assigned to each category of template. Together, we worked on new updated terms, layout and standardised risk positions on 25 documents across 5 categories. These included property, encroachments, contracts for goods & services, construction and NDAs simultaneously.

  • Launch I trained the legal administrator how to create intranet landing pages for each template category. We launched the new word templates with fill-in-the-blanks sections supported by user guides and embedded guidance notes.

  • Promote I designed a communication plan to promote the new templates. This included on-brand intranet posts, demo training presentations, newsletter content for the legal administrator to plug n play into their new intranet site.

I applied my tried and tested methodology refined from a decade of template management to deliver results

The Results

  • The legal team now has a central SharePoint drive of up-to-date, on brand legal templates

  • Council Officers can get access to legal support in a fraction of the time via the new intranet template library

  • Legal Risk is managed within the templates via agreed clauses, guidance text and training materials

  • New templates can be developed with step-by-step procedures documented in a template creation manual

What NPDC says

  • Helping a colleague with a short form consulting agreement took 15 minutes using the new template plus user guide. Before, it took me around 2 hours.

    Annabelle, Legal Services ManagerSolicitor
    New Plymouth District Council

  • I've learned so much from Sian. I feel confident to create new pages to host more templates in the future.

    Pravina, Legal Administrator
    New Plymouth District Council

  • The process was so organised. We went from a scattered range of templates saved in multiple locations to a centralised drive, catalogued and ready-to-use. We can help our colleagues so much faster now.

    Acting General Counsel
    New Plymouth District Council

Training resources created to demo how to locate, download and fill-in new on-demand templates

Templates catalogued by category for simple searching via intranet page

Each template category hosted on its own intranet page