M-Files Ment is a dynamic no-code document automation platform that allows users to automate documents in minutes – without requiring technical resource. One of its unique qualities is that it allows users—for example, lawyers—to produce templates easily through its 100% no-code visual interface with minimal training. You can pick it up easily and run with it, allowing users to scale their team’s automated documents quickly and at reduced cost.
Here are some key benefits in relation to M-Files Ment’s scalability:
• Reduced cost as technical resources are not required to automate • Very little training required so barriers to use are reduced at rollout • Lawyers are empowered to automate and maintain their own templates • Time-saving benefits of automating templates can be realized more quickly • Lawyers don’t need to relay the operation of contracts to non-legal technical resources, reducing miscommunication and reducing time needed for testing
Empowering Lawyers
Around five years ago, I was a document automation manager of an international law firm tasked with rolling it out across the firm. Before I took on the role, I was involved with two trials—the first had lawyers themselves doing the automation and creating their own templates, and the second was where there was one person devoted to the technical side with lawyers feeding instructions to automate their templates.
At the time, the findings were the first trial (where lawyers were empowered to automate their own templates) didn’t work so well, and the second was more suitable. The key reason was that lawyers at the firm didn’t want to learn something so technical at the expense of billable time. In this instance, there would have needed to be at least a day of formal training followed by weeks, or even months, after to master the tool. When the job dictated 6-plus billable hours, along with business development and CPD, learning how to automate ultimately fell down (and off) the list.
Rise of No-Code
Why do I mention this? Well one of the important benefits of M-Files Ment, and no-code more broadly, is that it can be picked up quickly with limited training—users can automate with M-Files Ment in as little as 15 minutes. There’s no need to undertake formal training for days at great cost to your team’s budget and time. M-Files Ment is designed to be intuitive and easy to use, meaning templates can take as little as minutes to create or hours for more complex ones—not days or weeks.
From an organizational perspective, deploying a tool in which you can realize the benefits so quickly is a competitive advantage. Usually, technical people need to be employed, or consultancy services acquired, to deliver return on investment—for example, getting the template automated and into use— and the maintenance thereafter. This adds time and cost and risks some loss in translation between the legal and non-legal personnel. M-Files Ment avoids this by giving lawyers themselves the capability to automate and maintain their own templates.
Document automation is a competitive market with plenty of options on offer. So, you may be wondering what differentiates M-Files Ment from the crowd?
Ease of use
With 100% visual design, it’s easy for users to go through questionnaires and understand the impact of their inputs on the document being generated. You have full trust in the output because you can see how information has been added or conditionality triggered. Other tools tend to require submission of the questionnaire before you can see the generated document which means: 1. You don’t tend to see the impact of your actions during the questionnaire. 2. Such a process doesn’t allow you to quickly see a side-by-side look at your inputs vs. the generated output.
No-code automation
At M-Files Ment, we pride ourselves on the fact that lawyers are able to pick up and run rapidly with the product—with as little as 15 minutes training. With a no-code interface, you’re able to automate documents in minutes—making it easy to maintain and scalable. Scalability is important as your organization will probably want to roll this out across departments or teams to maximize the benefits of automation. If it’s difficult to scale, then the overall value will take longer to realize and may lead to difficulties with change management. M-Files Ment is easy to scale and we can manage a pilot to launch your first templates into use within four weeks.
Client-facing functionality
One of M-Files Ment’s more unique and useful features relates to its client-facing functionality, which includes widgets and streamlined data collection.
Widgets provide access to a template and can be placed on a website or intranet for easier access. There are so many innovative ways of using this functionality e.g. it can even be used to allow clients to subscribe to templates (NDAs, DPAs, etc.) on a subscription basis. You can also easily collect data from clients by sending just the questions you want them to answer. Once they’ve submitted the answers to those questions, the template questionnaire you’re working on will pre-populate and you would just need to finish it off to generate the document—a slick process with no double keying of data.
Pricing Model
We want your implementation of M-Files Ment to be successful and we want your business to realize value from M-Files Ment in the quickest time possible. With that in mind, our plans now include unlimited standard users. If you need to experiment and innovate with those less accepting of change, you can—without being worried that you’ll need to pay for licenses.
The limitations dictating pricing focus on the number of author users—the people who create the templates, as well as the number of templates and widgets. However, even the most basic plan gives you enough of each to gain a solid return on investment. If you don’t want to be limited at all then there is a fully unlimited plan where you can automate as many templates as you like with as many users as you like, providing access to as many people as you like through widgets, internally or externally.
Our customers also tend to use our tool to build and sell subscriptions. So, M-Files Ment is document automation that saves you money but can also assist in making you money.
Clause Library
If you’re always re-inventing the wheel, creating the same variations of clauses over and over again, then you’ll love our clause library functionality. This allows you to store your clauses so you can reuse them later easily. Easily generate documents with the wording you need to close the deal more rapidly.
A pilot is a project that allows an organization to assess whether a piece of software matches that business’ requirements by adopting the technology for one particular use case and measuring its success. It tends to be a precursor for a wider roll out of the technology and aims to evaluate a use case before investing time and resources into a more extensive change project.
Key benefits
A pilot gives the business an understanding of: • The process required to adopt the technology, • How training will be carried out to users, • The process of bug resolution and support, • How the technology will be maintained, • Issues that may arise so lessons can be retained for future use cases.
M-Files Ment pilot
M-Files Ment offers pilots for those customers looking to get a subscription but want to make sure that it fulfills their requirements before they do so. It’s quite common for our customers to take a 1-2 month pilot so that the business and their users can get up to speed in a quick amount of time, while simultaneously benefiting from M-Files Ment support and leadership in successfully delivering the customer’s first few templates. By the time the pilot has been completed, the customer should be in a position to springboard into a more extensive roll out.
Components of the M-Files Ment pilot
These are some key considerations surrounding the M-Files Ment pilot:
Objective
Each customer will have a different view as to what they are hoping to achieve by adopting M-Files Ment – broadly split by what type of organization they are (be it in-house or law firm) and whether they are using it for internal efficiency or a more streamlined client-facing process.
Either way, we’ll work with the customer to understand what they want to achieve by adopting M-Files Ment, and will determine some success metrics so that they can easily determine the success of the pilot.
Here are some examples of pilots we have completed in the past: • Implementation of employment agreements within a law firm so the firm could draft them quicker and provide a better service to their clients; • Implementation of Widgets (links to automated templates) so that the customer could provide subscriptions through a paywall on their website; • Automation of NDAs and SCCs in-house so that non-legal users could have the ability to generate these themselves with limited legal team support.
Timescale
This is likely to be dependent primarily on the objective, but also on the capacity and engagement of people within the customer’s organization. We aim for completion of the pilot within four weeks—allowing a larger springboard into automating future use cases and ultimately getting value as quickly as possible.
Our main aim is to bring people within the customer’s business together to allow easy adoption of M-Files Ment, and to allow users to generate live documents in the quickest possible time. It goes without saying that, in order for this to happen within as little as four weeks, it will require limited delays from the customer throughout—for example, finalizing legal precedents, getting approvals, etc.
Deliverables
At the end of the pilot, the customer should: • Have up to three templates automated and ready to use (providing return on investment immediately after the pilot); • Have provided the relevant users with access to the automated templates; • Understand how to automate templates themselves—allowing the customer to scale document automation themselves with limited support; • Be ready to launch M-Files Ment with other use cases within the organization; • Understand what M-Files Ment support is available and how it can be utilized.
Team
The pilot is an M-Files Ment managed project which contains key stakeholders from the customer. It should contain all those stakeholders that the implementation will affect for the use case being implemented. It may also be beneficial to onboard others within the organization that the M-Files Ment implementation is likely to affect in the future so they can also gain from the pilot experience. With any technology pilot or implementation, it’s important that those involved are engaged and ready to deliver change within the organization. Lack of engagement is likely to mean that the pilot will have limited success on adoption. However, given that M-Files Ment pilots are so short, at four weeks, we don’t foresee this being an issue.
Cost
There’s a cost to the pilot program, but it’s likely to be more affordable than any other pilot of a similar product out there. The cost is worth it—it will provide return on investment in the quickest possible time and inject energy into the rollout of M-Files Ment within the customer’s business, which can be utilized for further use cases.
If the pilot is aiming to launch a subscription document generation service, then the cost of the pilot is likely to be offset by subsequent revenue brought in through subscriptions.
At M-Files Ment, we’re committed to ensuring our customers fully utilize our product and get the most out of it. We have a Customer Success team dedicated to just that which a strong mission to provide our customers with the help they need. These include the following:
Managing Pilots
Our team ensures our customers are able to maximize the benefits of document automation by managing pilots. These pilots aim to focus on up to three templates and make sure they go live successfully so our customers are able to get off the ground quickly.
Automation Services
While M-Files Ment prides itself on being a 100% no-code platform which users can automate quickly, it may also be the case that customers want to roll out to new areas of the business as quickly as possible. The Customer Success team is able to support and run projects to automate single documents or suites of documents so the customer can focus on managing change internally—without needing to worry about internal capacity for automation.
Consultancy
Depending on the need, the Customer Success team is able to offer consultancy services to customers. If we aren’t able to support, we can draw on our high-quality partners to assist. This is typically used where customers require support with the preparation of their templates, the automation of their templates, or change management. We understand that the implementation of technology has multiple facets, and we approach it holistically to support our customers.
Ongoing Support
The Customer Success team offers ongoing support to customers and responds to enquiries quickly. Depending on the enquiry, the team may respond with a text or even a screen recording of how to use a particular functionality. The team is there to make sure customers are utilizing M-Files Ment as much as possible to fulfil their needs, and this responsiveness and support is at the heart of making our customers successful.
Training
The team offers training during the pilot to make sure that authors are able to automate their templates. We support our customers with training so they are able to become self-sufficient when it comes to the automation of templates. We believe this is a key way customers can scale themselves without external support. If there is no pilot, then we also offer training at the beginning of the subscription. Further training can be provided at a cost, for example, to train new starter authors.
New Functionalities
We are continuously improving M-Files Ment as a result of advances in the market, and every day we continually finesse the platform for the benefit of our customers. This development means there are regular releases which add new functionalities to the M-Files Ment platform. After every release, the Customer Success team will send out release notes to customer product owners so they can review and take advantage of the latest functionalities and share them with their users.
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