Law Firm Onboarding

The law firm onboarding challenge

Onboarding a new law firm can be complicated. It requires collaborating across teams that might not collaborate easily with each other, due to the siloed nature of the tools and systems they use.

It requires getting multiple stakeholders to sign off on and complete a number of different contracts and resources—be they forms legal operations teams complete internally, engagement letters that your company needs to create and that the firm needs to complete, or retainer agreements.

Separate processes must move forward simultaneously.

There are just lots of moving pieces and technical hurdles that, historically, legal operations teams have needed to navigate manually, generally at high costs of time and energy.

How Tonkean automates the manual work

Tonkean empowers legal operations teams to take full control over all these various moving aspects of the new law firm onboarding process.

1. To kick off the onboarding process for a new firm, Tonkean enables users to submit new onboarding requests either via your organization's Tonkean legal operations portal or their personally preferred internal application—Slack, Teams, Email, etc.
2. From there, rather than forcing legal operations team members to create new documentation and resources every time a new law firm needs to be onboarded, Tonkean will do that for you. Tonkean can also leverage your existing resources, auto-populating those and storing them in the right place, if you have templates you prefer using.
3. Next, within a single form inside the Tonkean legal operations portal, legal team members can update multiple systems with information pertaining to the engagement and send those updates—along with any related action items—to all parties involved.
4. Whereas before, you would probably need to update several different technology systems with this sort of information, and manually pass along those updates to the other people involved, now you can do all this in just one place, via one action.

Contracts and engagement letters can also be approved, rejected, and signed by team members across application environments. No more pestering disparate teams to log onto and learn how to use varying interfaces to complete this process. Tonkean will come to you.

Track the onboarding process end-to-end

One of the most tiring aspects of the new law firm onboarding process is keeping track of all the different steps, systems, resources, and inputs completing the process entails.

Tonkean compiles all those moving pieces—and allows you to track the status of all relevant action items—in one place.

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Key here is the visibility provided. Typically, when the review process is passed onto an IT department that works in Jira, for example, it's as if the process falls momentarily into a black box.

But because Tonkean integrates with and can monitor every system used across teams during the review and onboarding process, legal ops never loses visibility, and remains up-to-date.

Requests are provided to each team in precisely the form and manner they prefer it—IT via Jira, for example—and the platforms pass all the relevant information back to legal ops teams working inside Tonkean proactively via APIs.

And Tonkean will keep tracking the onboarding process to its completion. As all the various contracts get generated and retainer agreements get reviewed, the status fields in the legal operations portal and onboarding tracker will update dynamically.

All this not only makes everything easier for legal, but ensures process adoption remains high.

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