Use Cases & Success Stories
A legal document automation platform has failed long before anyone files a complaint about it. The tell is quieter than that: lawyers stop asking about it. That’s what happened at Ropes & Gray, and it’s what led Sarah LaBeche, the firm’s Senior Practice Technology Advisor concluded: the problem wasn’t her lawyers. It was the tool.
For nearly a decade, LaBeche has worked on legal technology at Ropes & Gray, evaluating tools and helping the firm’s lawyers put them to use. In the first episode of Avvoka’s Built to Scale webinar series, she walks through the whole arc:
How she diagnosed a legacy platform that was quietly failing;
What she looked for when the firm went back to market;
And what changed once Ropes & Gray migrated to Avvoka.
The signs your legal document automation platform has failed
The clearest sign is time to value, not lack of enthusiasm. Ropes & Gray’s lawyers were never short on interest. They’d get excited about a new template, then watch it stall for months. When a firm’s document automation software takes longer to build than the deal it was meant to support, the tool is the bottleneck, not the process around it.
The mechanics were fragile enough that the smallest slip could unravel weeks of coding, with nothing in place to catch it before it happened. No fail-safes, no guardrails, just a lot of quiet ways for a template to fall apart and cause delays.
“You lose momentum,” LaBeche says. Lawyers get pulled into deals. The champion who pushed for a template moves on to the next one. What should have been quick instead drags on for months.
How to diagnose a broken document automation platform
Time to value. How long does it genuinely take to go from idea to a template lawyers actually use? Months and years aren’t sustainable benchmarks anymore.
A real partner, not a slick pitch. Does the vendor treat requests as a roadmap conversation, or as a closed door? A vendor who says “we can’t do that” and stops there is different from one who says “not yet – here’s how.”
Real automation vs. automation in name. Can the platform handle real complexity – nested conditions, cross-references, multi-layered logic, or does it fail a few branches in? Plenty of tools have a document automation feature. Far fewer are built from the ground up to be one.
For a global firm that had already sunk months of coding time into its existing templates, a fourth question sat above all three: what happens to the templates already built?
What changes when a firm switches legal automation software
The clearest evidence is what happened to the number of live use cases. Ropes & Gray went from a couple of active templates, maintained by a small developer team, to nearly 20 and growing, with new requests arriving every week, according to LaBeche.
Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
Active use cases | A couple | Nearly 20, and growing |
Who builds templates | A handful of developers | Developers and attorneys directly |
Time to automate | Months per template | Much faster, per LaBeche |
Lawyer sentiment | Losing interest mid-project | Asking what else can be automated |
The detail that matters most isn’t the count. It’s who’s doing the building. “Because there’s such a low barrier to entry, attorneys can pick up this tool and start coding tomorrow if they want,” LaBeche says alongside, not instead of, her technical team. That shift, from a couple of developers gatekeeping every template to attorneys maintaining their own, is what turned occasional requests into a standing pipeline.
Where should your firm start?
With an honest audit of what’s already repeatable, not with a vendor demo. Sarah’s approach, in order:
Check whether you’re templated
Find the templates with the biggest blast radius
Pick a tool built to be tested on, not just sold to you
That third point is where most firms get stuck, and it’s exactly the part Sarah unpacks in detail in the full recording of this conversation.
The takeaway
The best legal document automation platform isn’t the one with the longest feature list. It’s the one that removes friction between a lawyer’s idea and a finished template for the specialist building it and the attorney who’ll eventually maintain it alone.
Ropes & Gray isn’t a notable story because they decided to switch tools. Plenty of firms reach that conclusion and stall at the switching cost. What’s worth paying attention to is how they diagnosed the problem in the first place, and what they asked before signing anywhere else.
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Watch the full conversation on demand. It covers the framework. The on-demand recording of Avvoka’s Built to Scale series has the parts a write-up can’t carry: LaBeche walking through exactly how the Ropes & Gray migration was sequenced, the AI-versus-automation debate she has to have with associates in practice, what she’d do differently starting today, and the questions the live audience asked her directly.