When Shenetra Franklin joined Aspen Aerogels as Legal Operations Manager, the company was four months deep into implementing a new CLM, and the team estimated it would be several more months before implementation was complete.
Having implemented other CLMs in prior roles, Shenetra knew that even six months may be optimistic (and already untenable—especially for a busy legal team receiving a steady stream of requests from other departments).
Implementation was an uphill battle the team was tired of fighting, so they cut their losses and went searching for a solution that would let their team get back to work faster. This is how Shenetra found Lexion—and implemented it in just 9 days.
Aspen Aerogels needed help centralizing its contracting process—and fast
Shenetra demoed 10 CLMs, and almost immediately, Lexion was the easy front-runner.
“Lexion is easy enough to learn just by starting to use it,” said Shenetra. “It works out of the box, but it’s flexible enough you can adjust workflows yourself with almost no effort.”
It was a far cry from systems she’d implemented in the past, and Lexion provided value immediately. Implementation was fast, and adoption was easy.
“I had the entire legal team and a large subset of our business users trained in just nine days, and I was able to launch Lexion company-wide in just 19 days,” said Shenetra.
“We had contract requests within the first day of our training, and we had 62 requests from 23 different business users within the first month of going live with Lexion.”
Lexion’s easy personalization means quick optimization
Shenetra fell in love with Lexion at first demo because of the technology’s goldilocks approach to customization: it’s just right.
Lexion is plug-and-play, but it can be customized to individual organizations’ needs. Other platforms the team demoed were either too bare-bones to solve their challenges or too complex to do so seamlessly. For someone like Shenetra, who describes herself as “hands-on,” the power and ability to customize was a must-have.
“Out of the box, Lexion offered intake forms any company could use to get started immediately, and it’s easy to build your own.” Shenetra said. “I started with three intake forms, including a self-serve NDA form to allow business users to generate and send their own NDAs.”
Beyond intake, Shenetra was able to automate more of the process that the team had previously managed manually.
“Now, when a task comes in, it’s automatically assigned and no tasks get dropped,” said Shenetra. “I also built a workflow to automatically assign the relevant stakeholders and approvers across the company, so every contract follows the same required path. It was very straightforward.”
Personalization has proven key to gaining trust and buy-in from business users.
“I regularly make small changes based on feedback from the team to adjust Lexion to our specific use case—it’s my favorite thing about Lexion, and it means a lot that I don’t waste time waiting on support teams just to make a small change.”
And when tackling more advanced settings that require support, Shenetra said she appreciates that making an appointment with the Lexion support team is done by scheduling time on their calendar. There are no back-and-forth emails and no waiting on hold to call.
Saving time and earning wins across the board
For a legal team that’s constantly collaborating with other departments like Aspen Aerogels’, having the right CLM in place means collecting wins across the board.
“Almost every department in the company uses Lexion, everywhere from the legal team, the sales team, the technology team, HR, operations—it’s an enterprise-wide system.”
When measuring time saved, the results are meaningful. “I can run instantaneous reports that used to take me weeks of manual extraction,” shared Shenetra. “It’s not just the ROI on the actual purchase of Lexion, but on being able to make small changes over time to help the organization run more efficiently.”
“It’s taken a lot off my plate.”
