Contracts of employment: how to automate HR paperwork

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How do you create and automate contracts of employment at scale? The legal team at a recruitment company explains in this detailed guide.
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How do you create contracts of employment at scale?

Employment contracts are common to every business, and managing them often falls to the legal team. How can automation make the job easier, and where should you start? We asked Jemma Marks, from the legal team at recruitment company 3pX group, to share her insights, as well as Juro's VP of People & Talent, Thomas Forstner.

The conversation covers the concept of Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) and its benefits for non-legal teams. The panelists share their experiences with using CLM to automate HR processes and streamline contract management. They also provide tips for successful implementation and collaboration between legal and HR teams. The webinar highlights the importance of scalability, flexibility, and automation in managing employment contracts, especially when hiring abroad. The use of AI in contract drafting and review is also discussed.

Employment contracts: takeaways

  • Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) is not just for lawyers, it can benefit non-legal teams such as HR, sales, finance, and procurement.
  • Automating HR and employment contracts can save time, streamline processes, and improve collaboration between legal and HR teams.
  • Successful implementation of CLM requires dedicated time and resources, as well as effective communication and collaboration between teams.
  • Automation can be leveraged to manage employment contracts when hiring abroad, taking into account different jurisdictions and legal requirements.
  • AI can assist in drafting and reviewing contracts, but human oversight and legal expertise are still necessary for ensuring accuracy and compliance.

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Jacq Abernathy: Hello, everyone. My name is Jacq and I'm the VP of Customer Success here at Juro. And we're going to dive deep into the topic of how to unlock efficiency by automating HR and employment contracts. And I'm joined by two other panelists who I will introduce as I go through today's agenda. But you'll see lovely photos of them on the screen and you'll hear from them shortly. But on that note, let's go ahead and discuss what we are going to be covering today.

I'm going to kick us off briefly by introducing the concept of CLM and why it's not just for lawyers. And then from there, Juro's very own VP of People and Talent, Thomas Forstner, is going to discuss how a CLM actually works. He's going to walk through some of the differences between a CLM and how to, between that and using email and DocuSign. And he'll highlight some best practices for simplifying processes and reducing manual tasks. And he's also going to demo a salary increase letter and promotion increase. So we're excited about that.

And then from there, we have Gemma from 3PX recruitment. We're super excited to have her here. She's at 3PX. You may know them as Codex Recruitment. They've just gone through a rebrand, but they are a data analytics and EPM recruitment company, and they operate across the media in the US. And she has had a ton of experience in legal ops where she's been responsible for streamlining administrative functions across HR and legal.

And so she is going to be here today to kind of talk us through how she has helped to successfully help legal and HR teams work together in automating the employment contract processes. And then to round us out, we will segue into a live Q&A. We've had lots of live questions submitted in advance. So thank you for everyone that has done so. And if you haven't already submitted a question, we still have time. If you just go to the questions tab, you can type them up.

We're going to try to get through as many as we can today. We even have our very own Henry Warner on the line. He's a legal engineer here at Juro. And in his role, he has spoken to hundreds of in-house legal teams and HR teams and helping them implement CLMs. There's probably no question that he's not seen. So he's gonna be chatting away with you all. Equally, we have so much talent in this room right now. So if you put a comment in the chat, we would be super grateful for any experience or opinions shared by this group as well.

And then just one kind of quick note, the session is being recorded. So a copy of this will be sent to your email addresses once the webinar concludes.

Okay, perfect. So with that, let's go ahead and dive into the meat of the topic, which is all about automating contracts and really about contract lifecycle management. So just taking a quick step back just to make sure that we all have unifying understanding of what CLM actually is. So CLM stands for Contract Lifecycle Management. It is a concept that is super familiar for lawyers and legal teams, but perhaps it's less well known, but CLM is not just for lawyers because contracts aren't just for lawyers. Some of the biggest power users of CLM at Juro actually aren't even lawyers. They are the sales teams, the finance teams, procurement. And what we'll touch on today shortly are people teams as well. So if you came along today because you are not a lawyer, but you're interested in CLM and how it might automate some admin for you, Great, you're in the right place.

CLM and employment contracts

We'll just go ahead and take a quick minute to clarify exactly what is CLM. So CLM usually refers to software that can help manage a contract or agreement through every phase of its life cycle. So if we take a simple contract, let's say a non-disclosure agreement, there's a couple stages that that needs to process through. The first one is that it needs to be created. So it might be drafted by a lawyer or created from a template or maybe even initiated in another software tool. So for example, Salesforce is one that comes to mind. This might be something that you wanna initiate a contract when it's time to close a deal. So that's stage one.

The next phase would be collaboration. So the software allows you to work internally with your colleagues on that contract. So kind of finalizing the details that would be included in there, and in the clauses. Once you've collaborated, you need to go to the next stage, which is that it needs to be approved. And so CLM allows you to set up these approval workflows so the right people can sign off on a contract's term before it gets sent out.

Next up is negotiation. So with CLM, you should be able to securely negotiate that contract online with your counterparty. And then once you both have finally agreed that, of course, it needs to be securely and electronically signed by both sides. And then once you get that signature in place, you might want to post-signature actually track parts of the contract. It's important that you're able to manage your obligations. So you're tracking things like auto renewals. And then finally, if your contract is renewed, you know, you might actually start that cycle again.

So doing all of this efficiently and securely in one unified platform where it's easy to collaborate, that's really the promise of CLM. And so to really make CLM adoption successful and actually have an impact on non-legal teams, workloads and efficiencies, businesses often want to integrate contracts with other business systems of records. So for sales, again, that might be a CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot. For people in talent team, it might be ATS or an HRIS system such as Greenhouse or Workday and kind of so on and so forth.

And so for today, we're gonna go ahead and look at a couple of examples of non-legal teams automating tasks and workflows with CLM. And we're gonna start with Thomas Forstner with our very own people team lead here at Juro.

How People teams use CLM

Thomas Forstner: Thanks so much, Jacq. So no surprise, of course, that the People and Talent team at Juro, we are using our own product in order to kind of manage the entire lifecycle of any contract or agreement that has to do with candidates or employees. So if you're on the call, the types of documents that you will probably be dealing most with, like myself, will be offer letters, employment contracts, promotion letters, oftentimes something to do with share options, agreements, anything like that.

If you're anything like me, coming from businesses in the past, like I have that didn't have CLM in place at all, oftentimes you use about five different systems in order to get a single offer letter signed. This could be starting in Word or Google Docs, then turning that into a PDF, sending it over, then you can email it back and forth, lose track of versions before you finally put it into something like DocuSign or you're using the kind of Windows or Mac like default e-signature version to kind of get that done. It's a very clunky process.

So, you know, this is partly what attracted me to Juro when I joined, you know, having a journey that really is the lifeblood of any company because businesses tend to run through contracts to kind of automate that entire journey end to end. So let me show you just how we do this by using just a very simple use case, which would be sending a single promotion letter for, let's say, a person in the sales team.

What you're seeing here on the screen is the default Juro workspace. You can see that it's empty because this is a demo environment. So we are going to create a first contract. The way that I do that is by going here in the upper left, and I create a new contract from a template. That template I have created myself and I have full control over in this scenario. So as promotion and salary increases for any changes in level in the team, so I'll go ahead and click Continue.

What this does is it takes me to this kind of Q&A flow that we're at the start of here. What that is is basically a flow that enables anybody that is using a template to kind of go through it with a lot of help or text if I want that. So for example, I typically set up the templates, but members of my team, like my talent partners, my people partners, they actually use this. So I can help them go through this easily and keep all the documents aligned, if you're a little bit OCD like me, with a kind of simple workflow.

So I thought that the... because she's the artist of the year and it's really her year. We're going to give Taylor Swift a promotion increase and she's gonna be moonlighting as a salesperson at Juro. So Taytay, congratulations. I'm gonna just add her dress here. It's gonna be one Cornelia Street. If you know, you know, so shout out in the channel.

Let's say we've had the conversation about a promotion already. So we're going to just send out this letter today. Her new job title will be account executive moonlighting next to her career as an artist. I've specified in this contract that I want to have different types of currency enabled. So for example, at Juro we have a international team. We've got people in the UK, but also in Portugal. But in this case, I will make her UK based. So that's pounds as a currency.

Let's give her about 80K. Let's make her an ICM3. So this is just Juro's internal kind of leveling system that we have. I think many of you on the call will have some kind of career progression framework in place. And let's say that salary change goes into effect from December 1st.

Now, one thing that Juro's kind of workflow here allow is conditional Q&A. So basically what that means is if, for example, she did not have a bonus, this Q&A would end directly and straight go into the contract generation. If I select yes, then it kind of forks into another question, which we are going to select here, which is what's the percentage of the annual gross salary for bonus? Let's say it's 100% bonus. So you can kind of have this conditional kind of route if you want to do so, if you want to really heavily customize a template. You click continue, that creates this contract here. Just pull that out of the way just to make it a little bit simpler. So really it's a relatively simple, straightforward promotion and salary increase. One thing that you can see here, which I really like doing is the sort of green highlighted area.

Basically what that is is that I've selected this text here to either show or be hidden depending on whether the person receives a bonus or not. So in this case, I've selected the person is receiving a bonus, which means that this is going to show in the version that the counterparty, so Taylor Swift in this case, is going to receive. This would be highlighted red if I had selected no on the bonus. You can see here, they have two signature fields. If I wanted to, I would be able to sign this field right now because in the template I set myself up as the signatory, I'm not going to do that. Instead, what we're going to do is we are going to jump straight into the counterparty design so you can see what it would look like for Taylor Swift. One thing I'm just going to do here quickly is I'm just going to change this into an email address, jliteswift.com. Let's just assume that that was your email address.

I'm gonna copy this personal link and just show you that's gonna look like for her. So let's assume we just sent her that via email. This screen would pop up for her. Congratulations on your promotion. So you know, Jura would be able to recognize that this is a promotion letter. So that's neat little thing. For security purposes, it's gonna be a confirmation of her name. I put in, thank you for that. And now we're gonna open the document. So here's what Taylor is gonna see. It's gonna look.

pretty much like she would be used to. So it's not a spaceship she's looking at. This is very much similar to any kind of web-based editor like Google Docs. And you can see here that all the information is there, plus her quarterly bonus entitlement being there. She could sign directly from here, which let's say I'm going to do, click on here, type this as Taylor Swift, beautiful, perfectly album title. Once I've signed that, it's pretty much done.

This is how my team, so not a legal team at all. We have a general counsel at Juro that I work quite closely with. But this is how my team uses Juro day to day, week to week in order to manage documents. Now there's ultimately way more templates, et cetera, that we are using as well. But this is just one example to give you a sense of really how front to end the contract looks.

With that, I'm going to hand over to Gemma and Jacq to give you another spotlight, highlight for another use case.

Creating contracts of employment from templates

Jacq Abernathy: Nice. Thomas, thank you so much. And huge congrats to Taylor. Not only Artist of the Year, but New Juro Account Executive, which are big accomplishments in their own right. For any of you who just walked through this, if you have any questions around the product and how it works, as I mentioned, we have Henry on the line as well. Feel free to throw those questions in there and he will do his best to answer them. With that said, we're going to jump into some Q&A with Gemma.

Jacq Abernathy: So Gemma, thank you again so much for joining us today. The experience that you've had at 3PX Recruitment and helping your teams to successfully automate employment contract processes I know are going to be of great interest to many of the folks on the slide. So I introduced you earlier in the call, but it would just be really great to hear from you. If you could just tell us a little bit more about where you work and what exactly it is that you do.

Gemma: Perfect. Hi everyone. Yeah, as Jacq said, I'm Gemma from 3PX and I work within our operations team. Again, I'm not a lawyer, so similar to Thomas, but we use our contracts for recruitment purposes. And a big part of my role, well, the main part of my role is creating those kind contracts. And just a little bit of background as well. I'm the one who's largely led the implementation of Juro at Codex and sorry, Codex is our old name. We are now 3PX. I've largely overseen that the implementation and use it day to day for those purposes.

Jacq Abernathy: Nice, perfect. So you have a lot of experience working in the ops area, but also helping HR and legal kind of do their jobs more efficiently. Nice. Very relevant for today, obviously. So getting into the deep end a little bit, can you talk us through how is it that you currently use CLM to automate HR processes and maybe even specifically, what are the actual documents that you're automating and scaling through Juro?

Gemma: Yeah, so the majority of the documents we're creating in Juro at the moment are permanent staffing agreements and contract staffing agreements across the UK and the EU, as well as the US. So all of our templates are going into Juro and that's what we're using to send out to our potential clients. We are also looking to incorporate more of our internal employment contracts by the end of this year for our internal employees. But the majority of the contracts we're sending out and the templates we're using are for permanent and contract staffing.

Jacq Abernathy: Nice. It's interesting because you've got a breadth of contracts and obviously quite a variety of markets that you work across as well. So when you decided that you needed to bring in a CLM, can you help us understand what exactly were the primary business goals and challenges that you associated with employment contracts before implementing Juro?

Gemma: Yeah, absolutely. There were definitely a few issues that we were encountering before. I think the biggest one for us was the time we were spending creating contracts. We are still a small company, we're a small ops team. As I mentioned, the majority of client contract creation is down to me. We've had an increasing head count and sort of that capacity for what I could do with our old system. And like Thomas touched on earlier, we were using DocSign previously, everything was very, very manual. There are a lot of steps involved and especially in recruitment, there is a lot of negotiation when it comes to those contracts. So that process was also very clunky, sending red line copies back and forward via email. And then the last thing personally for me was having a, we didn't have really a centralized space for all of our contracts. We were using shared folders on cloud platforms and we do need those documents to hand. And it also leaves room for human error, having those saved everywhere and relying on people to do that. So that was definitely an issue for us that we wanted to resolve.

Jacq Abernathy: Nice. Yeah, I hear that a lot with customers as well. So just to kind of recap, it sounds like you're just spending too much time. There is no capacity to manually process the contracts and then of course no place to store. So unless someone uploads a contract, you may never see it again. Did I get that right?

Gemma: Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah. All of those things were very much the case with us.

Jacq Abernathy: I hear that quite a bit. Not only with HR, with other teams as well.

This is an excerpt from the full transcript. To watch the webinar in full, click the preview at the top of this page.

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