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Most legal teams are overwhelmed by the number of documents they need to store, keep track of, and analyze (before implementing a CLM). However, it’s fair to assume that eCommerce company Cart.com, which acquired 8 companies over 1.5 years, faced an uncommonly large breadth of documents and parties to keep track of, not to mention varying standards and risk tolerances to integrate. 

Multiple acquisitions led to document organization chaos

When Gregg Goldstein joined Cart.com as General Counsel, he made a valiant effort to build an organized document system — implementing a survey-type form for requests, a Google Sheet for tracking ongoing work, and a SharePoint repository for storing documents. But even with his ingenuity, the homegrown system meant working in multiple systems — an inefficient and impossible to track system. “Document organization was a hot mess, and it was compounded by the fact that we were acquiring new companies,” Goldstein said.

And part of the challenge with storing documents somewhere like SharePoint is that everyone on the team used the platform differently and might have a different process, which Gregg said meant inconsistent permissions, access, and organization, “The biggest issue was that people stored documents that weren’t visible to everyone. And with the acquisitions, sometimes documents were on another company’s SharePoint or another department’s, so you could only find what you were looking for if you had access — and that was after a long search.”

30 CLMs later — 51�Թ��� was just the right fit

Fortunately, Gregg is no stranger to Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) systems and knew with the right one, the Cart.com team could kiss their document storage woes goodbye — but which one?

“A great post-signature process with easy organization and intelligent searching was our highest priority when looking for CLMs,” shared Goldstein. And this is someone who truly values organization — in our conversation with Gregg, he referenced his list of 30 CLMs their team vetted before deciding on the right one. “We looked at all the CLMs on the market. A lot of the feature-packed ones didn’t make sense for us because we didn’t need all the tools, but in contrast, the more minimal solutions were too �����������.” 

“I’m a ‘bang for your buck’ kind of guy, and 51�Թ��� stood out because even though the solution is pretty simple and easy to implement, the AI is really impressive, which makes it a great value. Some other CLMs have good tagging technology, but the process is manual, and I didn’t have time for that with how fast we’re growing. 51�Թ���’s AI does an outstanding job of reading documents, extracting, and tagging important information automatically. With everything well organized, tagged, and easily searchable, finding the documents I need takes a matter of seconds — not the minutes, hours, or even days it could have previously. The time savings really add up.”

Smoother acquisitions and streamlined workflows with 51�Թ���

Cart.com continues to grow at a rapid pace. With 51�Թ��� in place, Goldstein’s legal team can keep up, “After an acquisition, we put all the customer and vendor contracts into 51�Թ��� and let it do its thing — there’s no manual step on our end, and we can immediately find what we need.”

And while Cart.com initially chose 51�Թ��� for its intelligent and easy-to-use document repository,  both organizations continue to mature. Now, Gregg’s team also uses 51�Թ��� for their pre-signature workflow. “The only way people are allowed to send requests to the legal team is through 51�Թ��� — but all they have to do is send an email, and it works flawlessly.” And the entire organization leverages Workflow, “We use it for approvals within the company from finance and procurement, which are sent straight from DocuSign. And our sales team uses the Salesforce integration to request documents from the CRM directly.” 

Gregg and his legal team of 3 love using 51�Թ���, or as he says, “are speaking the 51�Թ��� gospel,” because of the ease of use, implementation, and the shared visibility. “There’s a lot more ownership and accountability now that we’re not working off of a spreadsheet,” Gregg said, “and it’s easier to show the value of the legal team's work. Because of the audit trail in 51�Թ���, we can show where work is actually being held up, and it’s often not with legal.”

With the available data in 51�Թ���, Gregg gained approval to grow his team, “Because we were able to show our workload and how long each task is taking, I got approval to hire another lawyer to add to our team.”

So miracles do happen — sometimes, legal teams get the budget to grow when the work is quantifiable.

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