Guardant Health is dedicated to helping patients at all stages of cancer live longer and healthier lives through the power of their blood tests and the data they unlock. At Guardant, the legal department is comprised of 35 individuals, handling all types of matters, from intellectual property, patent filings, copyright, and compliance, to litigation.

When Mark Eldridge, Head of Legal Operations, joined the department, his goal was to enable the team to provide the best support possible to the broader organization. Within a short amount of time, he realized that the department had a lot of great people who were doing great work, but they didn’t always have the time for the strategic initiatives that would proactively serve the business.

Mark’s goal was to reduce that administrative burden and give the department time to chase the work they love doing — so he set out to find a new solution: Litify.

The journey to Litify

During the search for a new legal intakes tool, Mark soon saw that Litify stood out in a number of ways.

Litify integrated with Salesforce and their other key systems, including Okta and Workday, to centralize the metrics and data they needed to make informed decisions. The partnership with Salesforce also meant they didn’t need to worry about bringing in brand-new technology or needing specialized IT personnel to manage it. The company already used Salesforce in other areas, so extending its use to the legal department was a natural fit.

The team also felt Litify’s matter management was stronger with the native ability to take in the legal service request and turn it into a matter. Other options provided separate legal request management and matter management tools that could integrate, but wouldn’t be natively built within the same solution. With Litify, they could achieve system reduction and have one platform to see requests come in, turn into a matter, and then monitor how they’re handled and closed.

Even better? Mark says their implementation team came in highly prepared and able to conduct the deep discovery needed to understand their workflows and business needs — which enabled Guardant to implement Litify on time and under budget.

Learn more about Litify's approach to your implementation.

Life with Litify

Reducing administrative burden by 50%

Mark’s primary goal was to reduce the department’s manual, administrative tasks in order to provide a better experience to his internal associates and the business stakeholders who interact with the department.

Many of the legal associates were using group mailboxes or their personal email inboxes to manage legal requests. This left them unable to fully track their responses or turnaround times. Over time, as people took vacations or left the company, those one-off tasks got lost in the mailbox, and no one knew who was handling what — including the stakeholders who were searching for answers.

According to Mark, “This seems simple on the surface, but once you dive in, you realize that to formulate the response, you actually have to go into a separate system to pull the data, maybe get approval from another group, and it’s all these manual, little steps just to email the response back — which then isn’t documented anywhere for similar requests in the future. Plus, you just can’t get the granular insights you want when folks are emailing multiple inboxes.”

With Litify, that narrative has changed. Guardant Health now has one central place to submit and manage legal requests. Business stakeholders easily log new requests in a branded web portal, with an automatic confirmation that each request is being handled. The portal also contains a knowledge base of other key legal resources, such as frequently asked questions and training videos.

Upon submission, all legal requests are surfaced to the legal department so that tasks can be assigned and managed in real-time. The previously manual workflows are now automated in Litify, so each associate can see at a glance what actions have been taken and what needs to happen next. With everything centralized, the team could immediately start tracking turnaround times on requests and establishing SLAs with their business stakeholders.

Mark says his goal has been achieved and estimates that Litify has reduced the legal team’s administrative burden by 50% while driving accountability and transparency to the team and business.

The value-add: “see around the corner” metrics

By partnering with Litify, Guardant Health not only got a much better understanding of their requests, but they also have clarity on the metrics surrounding them. How many requests are they getting? Where are they coming from? The legal department can now identify if there’s a clustering event happening from a certain group or location to address these requests holistically.

“I call these the ‘see around the corner metrics.’ If we see enough of these events, maybe we need to do more training or look into our data controls. This is where you get into the real value-add for the business. None of us want to be filling out privacy disclosures all day, for example, so if we can put new systems in place to prevent these requests from happening again, it saves the company time, and it saves our people time,” said Mark.

What's next

Guardant Health’s big initiative is to continue rolling Litify out to other smaller groups within the legal department. They’re currently working with their litigation and employment teams to identify their workflows so they can be built and automated within the platform.

According to Mark, “The ongoing support has really helped us understand that Litify isn’t just a one-time purchase. This is a partnership. The Litify team is helping us grow and they want our feedback as they build out new features to ensure clients are getting what they need to solve their business problems.”