A strategic approach to implementing new technology is crucial for establishing a successful partnership with the right vendor from the outset.
This playbook invites you on a journey of transformation and innovation, highlighting the remarkable sense of camaraderie that has developed within the legal department at Property Finder over the past three years. With strategic foresight, Zaid Gardner, General Counsel, has assembled a talented team and integrated technology to support a diverse set of challenges. In just three years, this team has expanded from one member to five and has earned the esteemed Property Finder Trailblazer Team award. Their unwavering dedication to providing exceptional support for the business has been key to their success.
Zaid Gardner, Charmaine Shyu, Monica Ahuja & Sumit Chopra
Not long after Zaid joined Property Finder, the company began a fast growth trajectory, and needed the support of Monica Ahuja, who joined as Senior Counsel. Monica was initially tasked with integrating and establishing connections across the wider business. It quickly became apparent that with just two team members managing over 300 people across multiple locations, their approach was scattered, relying on informal shoulder taps and emails. This led to inefficiencies and the risk that critical tasks could slip through the cracks. Monica and Zaid foresaw the need to bring in structured legal operations to organize their work and have everything in one place.
“It was the realization that being good in-house lawyers was more about being good ambassadors and custodians for the business. You’ve got to be business people with legal skills and we needed legal operations to help,” says Zaid.
Charmaine Shyu was brought onboard to take this idea of consolidation and action it. Her key philosophy was, she says, “You’ve got to be lean, but you’ve got to be effective.” She needed to find a way to serve the wider business, while freeing up her legal team’s time to become more effective and focus on higher-value strategic work.
The first step in the process for Charmaine was to spend time with the legal team and the business to understand capacity, the types of work flowing in and out of the department, and how the teams wanted to work. After mapping out these workflows, she researched the market and found LawVu.
What stood out to her about LawVu was the workspace approach to managing legal operations — a single solution that incorporates intake, workflow management, and insights and reporting.
“LawVu is built for in-house legal teams with an easy-to-use interface, and gives the wider business a good user experience through a legal front door, which means they are more likely to use it.”
The second key step was finding a software that was quick to implement, with little input needed from IT. “Not only has LawVu been easy to adopt and maintain, but the tool also provides powerful automations that can be applied to improve workflows and save time,” explains Shyu.
Charmaine did a remarkable job ensuring her team was brought along the journey of choosing a legal operations software. Sumit Chopra, Legal Director, joined the team at a similar time as Charmaine, and for him it was about finding a partner who shared the same values.
“LawVu stood out due to the like-mindedness of their people. We're constantly interacting with a team that understands lawyers' problems in a business setting, and I think that is great. Apart from the tech, which is good, the people we work with understand the issues that we face.”
Choosing a solution ultimately came down to the fact that it was time to transform the narrative of the in-house legal team. “We are more than just lawyers – we are key partners to our business, and LawVu enables this,” says Charmaine.
The team was deliberate in their intention to implement LawVu and it was this mindset that has set them up for success. “We set our sights on climbing this mountain and figured out a way to get there,” says Zaid.
The team is modest in their account of how their implementation of LawVu was so well executed — it was marked by meticulous planning and effective change management. The team emphasizes the importance of starting with the legal team itself and that this internal focus was crucial for understanding team capacity and aligning processes. The LawVu team guided the process, encouraging them to work together to learn the system and map workflows.
Once the team was happy with the system setup, they rolled it out to the business. “Like anything new, there was some initial hesitation and pushback from the wider business, because our intake forms were lengthy,” recalls Charmaine. However, the team knew it was a long-term commitment that would require constant evaluation and iteration. They’ve stuck with this and refined their intake forms, making it easier for the business to send requests.
In the rollout of LawVu, the team also discovered a few additional features that have been a pleasant surprise. The key one is the Gmail integration. “We now have a history of what transpired in conversations and negotiations, which is a good thing for us because it’s no longer sitting in another person’s email or inbox,” says Charmaine.
For Zaid and the team, the process of implementing a new software was never seen as a big deal. “The change management piece didn’t feel too daunting for us because we knew we had a path to get there. Timing was good, and we found the right partner in LawVu. You have got to be grateful for those opportunities and then make the most of them.” Overall, it took six months to get to this point and start seeing value from the system.
Monica, Sumit and Marianna Gergis, Senior Legal Counsel, each look after different areas of the business. This was a strategic move by Zaid. “I wanted to give them each the chance to better understand that particular part of the business – its work, its context, its road map – and as a result, they’ve started to build trusted relationships with the people who work in those departments.”
Every business function at Property Finder relies on legal, so it was imperative for Zaid to set up the team with the tools to be successful and break down any silos that existed between departments. The LawVu legal workspace has enabled the team to do this by creating visibility into their processes and the status of legal requests.
Sumit, who works closely with the technology team, says the feedback has been positive.
“They see the value in LawVu because they have a system to go to. Response times are now faster, and there is stronger collaboration between teams because they can go into LawVu and see the status of their matter and contract rather than sending emails back and forth.”
For Marianna, who works with all of Property Finders regional markets, the benefit of LawVu has been “the visibility for the team members to understand the status of their requests. They now have one platform for everyone to interact and have visibility on what we are working on.” The other key piece has been the key date reminders. “These have been a helpful feature for everybody, because we now get automatic notifications that give us visibility on what’s due or up for renewal, and this in turn removes risk and saves time for everyone involved across the business.”
And it has paid dividends. In 2024, the legal team won the Property Finder Trailblazer Team award!
For the Property Finder team, the LawVu legal workspace brings together their matters, contracts and intake into one system which has provided transparency and removed silos. If one of the team goes on holiday, their work can easily be picked up and kept track of, which keeps things moving forward and removes the financial risk that results from missed deadlines. And it’s important for Charmaine that she has set the team up for future success. “We want to ensure these documents outlive us – that they are in one system that’s easily accessed and easy to search – for future team members.”
For Monica, the main benefit of a legal workspace is that it organizes and takes care of the high volume of repetitive tasks, which frees up her time, allowing her to focus on the more strategic work she came in-house to do.
“Once we were able to analyze all of our work, we created a risk matrix on what we want to work on, and then accordingly created a triage of what we need to do and how much time we should devote to it. That's helped us be more efficient and more strategic.”
The logical way the team’s work has come together has saved time. “Prior to using LawVu, we relied on email to manage our legal requests and workload. LawVu’s integration of matter and contracts has created a coherent and logical workflow for our in-house legal team,” says Charmaine.
The key result of consolidating intake and workflows into one system is that it brings together data and provides powerful insights and reporting to demonstrate the team’s impact on the wider business. Specific views like the GC Dashboard have given Charmaine and Zaid the ability to have a bird’s eye view of the department to ensure that resourcing needs are met — the impact of this has clearly supported the substantial growth of the department over the past three years.
“Metrics allow you to run your legal department like a business,” says Charmaine. “Tracking metrics allows you to apply the same rigor in strategic thinking as any other of your business’s departments – they allow you to think differently. Metrics are about identifying your inefficiencies, finding your bottlenecks, and thinking about how you bring value to the organization in a way the business appreciates and understands. Metrics are important because they also provide data-driven insights – they can replace that ‘gut feeling’ emotion. You can be confident that all of the insights you have are actionable, measurable, and clear.”
Now that the team is equipped with this data and feedback, they’re set up to take their use of LawVu to the next level. They are committed to optimizing LawVu across all departments, ensuring that all areas of the business can benefit from streamlined processes and improved visibility.
In particular, they will focus on three major projects, including the automation and self-service of many different contract types that come through the department, refining the metrics they’re tracking, utilizing the LawVu API to integrate future with other teams’ systems to support the push and pull of data and information.
“Self-service for legal documents has been received well by the business with our trial of NDA automation, and we’re looking forward to expanding this automation across at least eight more contract types,” explains Charmaine.
Reflecting on the past three years, Zaid says technology is now mandatory if any modern in-house legal team is to thrive.
“I’m incredibly proud of my team. We are now one of the most productive teams in the business, and I think it’s not just what they do, but it’s how they do it; LawVu certainly enables that.”
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