Introduction
When you’re a large restaurant franchisee operating more than 830 stores across multiple brands – including Wingstop, Little Caesars, Jersey Mike’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, Jamba, and more – the volume of legal work is extensive.
For Samuel Gray, Corporate Counsel at Sizzling Platter, the challenge wasn’t just managing the legal team’s workload, it was about how the existing tools for managing work and organizing information were slow, inflexible, and poorly suited to the needs of the company.
In LawVu, Samuel found a solution: a workspace approach to legal operations designed specifically for in-house counsel. Implementing LawVu has transformed how the Sizzling Platter’s legal team supports the organization’s growth, and become a model for other departments seeking to improve their information systems.
How Sizzling Platter ran this play
Step 1: Implementation without the fear factor
Samuel noticed a pattern when listening to other in-house counsel talk about managing contracts and other legal matters. People talked about how so many supposed solutions failed due to poor implementation. “So many GCs really struggled with getting business partners to fully engage and use legal software,” he says.
His own experience with LawVu couldn’t have been more different.
“It was great. It took about three months. The LawVu team helped carry a lot of the load, which included them bulk-creating more than 700 matters based on data we were already tracking in our project spreadsheets. It was a massive job, and it accelerated our time-to-value hugely.”– Samuel Gray, Sizzling Platter
Avoiding the headache of manually creating those matters saved up to 175 hours of data entry.
Having a clear plan and dedicated support was key to the smooth implementation. Good communication was also vital, and Samuel appreciated how the LawVu team created a plan that clearly set out expectations of how long the process would take. As he points out, adopting a new tech system isn’t something that happens overnight, it takes becoming immersed in the new ways of working for all the pieces to start fitting The well-organized integration – which took three months from contract signing to go-live – was essential to generating internal buy-in. “That was tremendously important. When our portfolio management director said, ‘I’ll want to use this over what we’re already using,’ I knew it was going to work.”
Step 2: A workspace built for in-house
Samuel says prior to implementing LawVu, he was constantly frustrated by a system that was inadequate for his team’s needs – it was slow and not user friendly.
“What I liked about LawVu is that when I did the demo, I immediately saw how I could use it. That sold me. Within 30 minutes I got a walkthrough of how to set up the platform, how information would be organized, how document management and the business portal worked for intake. It was a coherent package.”
According to Samuel, the main advantages of using LawVu are:
- Matter management and task management
“I use LawVu every time I have a one-on-one… I just click on a saved view of the matters that someone on my team is working on, we go through it, and everything I need is in there with important information visible.” - Powerful integrations
“Linking LawVu matters to SharePoint folders has been tremendously helpful in projects where multiple departments need access to a shared workspace. Microsoft Outlook and Word integrations are major time savers. And the PowerBI integration enables the legal team to make key data visible to our business partners in a completely new way.” - Renewals and deadline confidence
“I really like the notifications for contract expiration. I don’t have to do any digging, any searching, it’s right there. This saves time and risk to the business for accidental renewals.” - Linked records = instant context
“One of the greatest features in LawVu is linking records. All stores we have acquired are now linked to an asset purchase agreement. Having that at my fingertips is super helpful.” - Speed you can feel
“Before, it might have taken 15–20 minutes just to start working on certain requests because information was stored in so many places. These days, it takes two minutes because all the information is at hand. That time saving really adds up.”
To give context to Samuel’s remarks, implementing LawVu has created a solid return on investment. Search times have plummeted, going from seven minutes to almost instantaneous. Commencing a matter is now a two-minute job rather than 15-20 minutes. Breaking that down, if the team clicks into 10 matters a day that’s a saving of two to three hours a day – between 10-15 hours per week.
Step 3: Inspiring change beyond legal
LawVu hasn’t just improved legal efficiency at Sizzling Platter, it’s influencing how other departments in the organization think about managing their work. For example, Samuel says other departments have noticed the benefits of LawVu over other software platforms for shared internal services.
LawVu is also strengthening the legal team’s ability to show value through data. “With the LawVu API, we’re working on pulling certain legal data and feeding it into Power BI, which is the primary dashboard the business people use,” he says. “That’s becoming a key part of our risk management strategy.”
And they’re pushing into automation to move the needle further.
“One of my team members used the contract creation wizard to allow our Mexico team to draft service contracts automatically. It’s completely eliminated a major bottleneck in our development process, and we’re looking at other use cases for the contract creation wizard.”– Samuel Gray, Sizzling Platter
Key takeaways
- With the right partner, implementation isn’t big and scary
For Sizzling Platter, implementation was completed with a minimum of fuss over a period of three months. That LawVu was able to bulk-create more than 700 matters automatically meant a huge saving in time and potential stress on the legal team. - A workspace purpose-built for in-house = measurable time back
LawVu has given the legal team the capacity to do more high-value work. Faster starts, instant search, linked context, notifications and tasking is, at a conservative estimate, saving the team 10-15 hours per week. Every service contract generated by the Mexico team saves several hours of legal professional time and accelerates development schedules by days or even weeks. - Legal can lead transformation across the business
The seismic transformation of how the legal team operates has not gone unnoticed by the wider business, with departments acknowledging the worthiness of what LawVu offers.
Next steps
Sizzling Platter’s in-house legal team is striving to continue building on its LawVu foundation by expanding the business portal resources, deepening API-driven reporting in Power BI, and piloting wizard-based lease drafting to compress cycle times at scale.
“Having this data visible and allowing a business team to aggregate it is going to be a useful management tool for them.”– Samuel Gray, Sizzling Platter