Transforming legal operations - How Apollo implemented Streamline AI

The challenge

At Apollo.io, a lead intelligence and sales engagement platform, rapid company growth was both an exciting opportunity and a growing challenge, particularly for the lean legal team of two as the team was just getting started. The Chief Legal Officer and Senior Legal Operations Manager understood the need to set the foundation with certain building blocks, and that included a solution on how to tackle a surge in legal requests for the new function and an expanding legal team for routing of increasingly complex requests. The legal team sought out a request intake and management software solution to streamline their legal workflows and effectively manage the burgeoning volume of requests.

The team considered other solutions, including legacy ticketing platforms. However, the team found that legacy ticketing solutions proved inadequate for their needs due to the need for IT support for modifications, which delayed the ability to adapt forms and workflows for evolving legal and business requirements. Due to their user interface and time-consuming build process, these legacy tools required significant time investment. This dependence on external teams not only made it difficult to implement timely changes but also positioned the legal team as a bottleneck, hindering business agility and responsiveness.

“I had worked with legacy tools like Jira previously, and the workflows were super hard to build,” Senior Legal Operations Manager Brenda Perez shared. “For even one little update, we had to rely on a technical team or admin to update it. It would be so frustrating not to be able to get past a request because we were blocked by needing to wait for someone else to update the workflow.”

Streamline AI’s user-friendly interface and efficient workflow capabilities quickly set it apart from other solutions. Streamline’s no-code form and workflow building gave the team ease of use and autonomy in managing the legal workflows that they needed.

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The solution

“Right off the bat, Streamline AI was a pretty easy choice,” Brenda emphasized. “When we did the demo with sales, Karen was amazing and my questions were all answered without a hitch. She did a great job of making me feel immediately comfortable with the system. There are beautiful dashboards for tracking metrics automatically. Streamline AI’s user interface is very intuitive, and it’s easy to set up and implement. I loved the part where Karen was showing me the option to create conditional logic so we’re able to gather the information we need without overwhelming the requestor, and I would be able to create it all on my own.”

Brenda praised the implementation process and the support from Streamline AI’s team, particularly highlighting the sales team and customer success team’s role in facilitating a smooth deployment. 

“From our initial kickoff meeting to the launch of our new intake system with Streamline AI, it only took a month,” Brenda remarked. “Evan, our awesome customer success manager showed us the ropes — how to set up workflows — and brainstormed with us on what would work best for the team. I was then able to take off and run it from there. It was super easy for me to go in and add users, update workflows, and change conditional logic. If I need to change something, I can go in on my own and make it look the way I want it to look. Also, with feature updates, Evan is always open to hearing feedback, and sometimes he and the product team are one step ahead of me and are already working on an update that I am interested in seeing in Streamline AI.”

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The impact

Streamline AI has helped position the legal team, now a team of seven, as a dynamic enabler within the organization. The centralized processes for legal intake have enhanced collaboration between legal and cross-functional teams and improved efficiency across the company. With Streamline, there is transparency and tracking in a centralized location to see all the things on the team’s plate and to be able to choose to resource or not resource accordingly, give other teams updates on where things are, and connect dots on related requests. Within four months of rollout of the new process, average review time for legal requests dropped by more than 50%. 

“All our teams know there’s an easy way to submit requests to Legal. We’re now getting looped in early, so we’re able to get ahead of the game. Legal doesn’t have that perception of being a blocker or reactive. We can track whether things require a quick answer or need a more in-depth answer, where they’re coming from, and more. We can manage requests more efficiently and improve turnaround times for legal requests.”

The success of Streamline AI has led to the fast adoption of Streamline AI by the legal team members to collaborate with their cross-functional partners.

Brenda shares, “We’ve expanded our workflows to include a privacy questionnaire workflow. Before Streamline AI, the account manager on the sales team had to send emails to security and legal teams to coordinate how to fill out customer security questionnaires. Some had to be completed by the security teams and others by the privacy team, leading to overlap in the work being done. With Streamline AI, it’s clear who’s on first base, who’s on second, and who’s doing what. Our privacy manager can now track all of her requests from her Streamline AI dashboard and then close out the ticket accordingly. It’s been a good win.

We have also created a product feature legal review workflow which has not yet launched, but I’m excited for the product and engineering teams to have an easy way to submit requests to loop in legal early in the process, and for a central place where product counsel can advise on the features they’re building. I’m also excited to see what metrics we will get out of it!”

Brenda added, “I’ve even set up a legal ops workflow for myself, which makes me so happy. I have a centralized location for all the legal operations requests that come in. I love being able to easily turn an email or Slack message into a request in Streamline and then collaborate on the work in the Streamline ticket. I’m able to keep track of requests that come in and easily track what I’m working on. Things get checked off so much quicker because of this new process.”

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