The Challenge: Adapting at Scale
Veronica Yu, Director of Legal Operations at Instacart, joined Instacart as a junior paralegal several years ago. The company at the time looked very different than it does today. Since then, Yu has seen her team evolve from just a handful of legal professionals to a legal team of more than 50 people.
With that growth came the need to adapt. For example, tracking requests and conducting processes manually via email can be sufficient for a small team of attorneys and legal professionals. But as Instacart’s legal team grew, Yu knew she needed a platform partner that could help her more efficiently do things such as manage and track the status of every request. But she didn’t want to totally disrupt the way her team did things, either.
“The processes that worked for a 10 person legal team were very different from what we needed for a 50 person team,” said Yu. “We needed metrics and data to quantify all the hard work the team was doing, without adding more to their already overflowing plates.”
At the time, Instacart’s contract review triage and intake process was managed through an email inbox managed by commercial attorneys and contracts managers. When a contract arrives at Instacart, a complex and changing web of criteria determines which departments need to approve it, depending on the financial value, type of counterparty, type of engagement, and what the relationship will be. Some contracts require little human review and involvement while others require multiple approvals across different teams. Largely, the responsibility of obtaining and tracking those approvals falls on a legal team member—who is also responsible for reviewing the contract and ensuring contractual obligations are understood by the business.
This became harder to manage at scale.
“If we needed to pull a report of what the prior 3 months, 6 months, or 1 year looked like, that would’ve been an extremely manual process with managers having to ping each person on their team for updates and sift through emails,” said Yu. She started looking for platforms. But she didn’t quickly find what she was looking for. “I looked at more traditional platforms to address the intake and ticketing problems and legal-specific systems that would generate simple documents or contracts for signature. I was struggling to find one platform that could handle both: the extremely simple requests requiring little human intervention and the complex requests that require multiple layers of approvals and must be drafted by a team member.”
Above all else, Yu needed a flexible platform that could stand up quickly—a vendor that needed six months to build out a solution wouldn’t cut it.
Another important priority was avoiding change management—for example, she needed a platform that could plug into legacy systems that Instacart’s legal team was already familiar with. And a critical third priority was supporting a “crawl, walk, run” approach that would start by addressing simple processes and wins quickly but have the potential to do much more.
“Instacart has always been a very fast-moving company. It became very clear to me that we needed a vendor that could adapt and move as quickly as we did,” said Yu. “We wanted to implement something that would be able to continue to grow and adapt with the company. So that’s what brought us to Tonkean.”