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.
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.
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