ContractWorks and Esquire Deposition Solutions

Even before adopting contract management software, Avi Stadler, Chief Legal Officer at Esquire Deposition Solutions, always kept the company’s contract portfolio extremely organized. But without dedicated software, tracking contract information, searching for specific documents, and reporting on contract data proved to be time-consuming endeavors. All of that has changed since Esquire started using ContractWorks to sign, store, and monitor their agreements.

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Overview

About Esquire

Esquire Deposition Solutions supports legal professionals around the world through their comprehensive deposition services and state-of-the-art technology solutions. Esquire supports more than 140,000 depositions annually with in-person and remote court reporting, interpreting, audio, and video services.

Based in Atlanta, Georgia, Esquire was founded in 1978 and has grown to a team of more than 500 people with over 35 office locations across the U.S.

Introduction

Case Study

Chief Legal Officer Avi Stadler had been fastidious about keeping Esquire’s contract portfolio organized, but still ran into trouble finding information quickly, thanks in large part to the internal shared drives that were used to house all of the organization’s documents. Without the ability to search, Avi had to manually scour through agreements any time Sales or another department had a question about the status of a contract. It became clear that he needed a better solution.

Avi led Esquire’s search for contract management software, and ended up meeting with three or four other providers before choosing ContractWorks based on the ease of use, short implementation process, built-in electronic signature, and affordable price point.

Challenges

Without the right technology, keeping track of every document in a large contract portfolio can create headaches for even the most organized legal team. And for Esquire’s Chief Legal Officer (and the only lawyer at the company) Avi Stadler, that process involved a significant amount of time spent on manual work to ensure Esquire’s agreements were up to date and on track.

Creating reports and responding to contract inquiries from other departments also proved to be a difficult task — especially since not all contracts had actually been sent to Avi in the first place. This also created problems and slowed down the process when Avi needed to find and produce documents for litigation or deals.

As Esquire’s only lawyer, Avi played a key role in the company’s hiring process as well. This manual, paper-heavy process of signing, sending, and filing employee agreements made it difficult for Avi to access and review the documentation Esquire needed to collect for every new employee.

As a busy CLO responsible for adopting a solution to improve Esquire’s contracting practices, Avi knew he had to move quickly, and couldn’t afford to waste time on a lengthy implementation process.

100s of contracts

Manual tracking & reporting

Can't find key data quickly

Slowed by shared drives

Results

To Avi's pleasant surprise, he was set up and functional in ContractWorks in a matter of just days. All of Esquire's contracts are now organized, accessible, and searchable within their ContractWorks repository, so Avi — and other authorized employees — can find the documents and key data they’re looking for immediately. This improved contract access has been even more important for the Esquire team as much of their workforce has transitioned to a remote environment.

While adopting ContractWorks started with Avi and the Legal team, Esquire has since expanded their use of the system so departments across the organization can improve the way they manage agreements. Esquire’s IT leader, Real Estate team, Sales Enablement department, Marketing team, and Human Resources are all using ContractWorks to sign, organize, and track their contracts more efficiently. Everything from corporate governance documents and real estate leases to customer contracts and vendor agreements are now stored in one accessible, searchable contract repository.

Selected a solution to match their needs

“ContractWorks was the easiest to understand, easiest to use, and had a lot of the features we needed - at a price that was reasonable. And the implementation was really manageable. Some of the other solutions we looked at the implementation was going to be expensive and take a long time.”

Found a more intuitive way to get contracts signed

“The e-sign tool has been life changing for us. We actually used DocuSign for some other things - there’s a department that uses DocuSign so we could have used that all along, but it didn’t make sense. This makes sense.”