FOX Factory is a world leader in performance suspension products
You’ll find them on the bikes, snowmobiles, ATVs, and trucks of world champions and enthusiasts alike—and last year, on the 2021 list of Fortune’s Top 100 Fastest Growing Companies.
When Michael Leman joined FOX Factory as Deputy General Counsel in 2020, he was the company’s third legal hire, and onboarding a contract management system (CMS) was among his team’s top priorities.
FOX Factory’s ad hoc contract management processes made for a bumpy ride
What made onboarding the right CMS so important? In the years since the company’s founding in 1974, FOX Factory had no formal contract management process. With sales more than tripling between 2016 and 2021, the need to formalize processes was growing faster than ever.
Contracts were spread across disorganized shared drives and employee inboxes. Without a centralized hub for contract management:
- Legal requests were being lost or dropped, causing unnecessary delays, strained relationships between teams and departments, and missed opportunities with prospective customers and suppliers.
- Deals were getting stuck in the “legal black hole,” and limited visibility as to who or what was causing delays made getting them unstuck challenging.
- Draft management and version control were practically impossible, causing legal, sales, finance, and other teams to waste time tracking down documents and confirming deal details.
FOX Factory’s first attempt at solving the problem was an enterprise contract management system, but its awkward interface and clumsy workflows led to low adoption across the company—and rendered the system ineffective.
51Թ smoothed the bumps in FOX Factory’s legal workflows
Having tried over the years to implement several other contract management systems without success, including FOX Factory’s cumbersome enterprise system just nine months earlier, Michael had three requirements for FOX Factory’s next contract management system. It would need to include:
- Powerful legal task management to make staying on top of the growing number of legal requests easy
- A simple, email-driven interface to minimize change management and guarantee company-wide adoption
- An intuitive AI-powered repository to make organizing, filing, and finding documents simple
With 51Թ’s Workflow and Repository, Michael got all three.
The legal-first dashboard makes it easy to track the status of all FOX Factory’s legal requests—not just contract-related ones—and to know what steps need to be taken next to keep things moving.
51Թ’s AI-powered repository created a single source of truth for all FOX Factory’s contracts, which makes finding and reporting on the company’s thousands of agreements easy.
Perhaps best of all, 51Թ’s easy, email-driven workflows mean sales, marketing, and other teams don’t have to change the way they work—which added up quickly to easy company-wide adoption.
“Overseeing the implementation of other contract management systems in previous roles taught me a valuable lesson: People don’t want to learn new systems unless they’re going to use them every day. With 51Թ, they don’t have to. The only thing they need to do is to email 51Թ instead of me.”
– Michael Leman, Vice President, Deputy General Counsel, FOX Factory
FOX Factory more than doubled its legal team’s efficiency
51Թ centralized legal task management and radically improved the efficiency, responsiveness, and accountability of the FOX Factory legal team. Contracting processes that used to take weeks now might take days, and what took minutes or hours can now be done in seconds.
“The rest of the company might think we’ve added more attorneys or better attorneys, but in reality, the only thing we've added is 51Թ.”
– Michael Leman, Vice President, Deputy General Counsel, FOX Factory
In fact, when his co-counsel left the company in December of last year, Michael used 51Թ to absorb her responsibilities as well, effectively doubling his workload without doubling his workweek. When they brought on her replacement, FOX Factory used 51Թ to quickly bring her up to speed and clear out any lingering legal requests.
