Misha Kuzemskyi joined airSlate as a customer support representative in early 2021. A few months later, he transferred to the airSlate Legal team to become a Legal Ops & Automation Manager. Misha’s career transformation came as no surprise — before airSlate, he had earned a law degree and worked as a legal assistant in a law firm.
airSlate’s legal automation pioneer
Misha’s position at airSlate is quite unique — he’s the first Legal Ops & Automation Manager in the company.
“I build Flows, automate processes, and manage documents that are not only limited to the Legal department. The purpose of this role is to transfer as many legal processes as possible to the airSlate platform to automate them,” says Misha.
It was Roman Perchyts, Head of Legal at airSlate, who came up with the idea of automating legal processes. Misha was a believer and became an enthusiastic implementer of the project!
Despite having had automated Flows in place for a long time, the Legal team wasn’t using airSlate to its full capacity. It was evident that a number of processes could be further streamlined for lawyers, raising their efficiency and productivity while minimizing the neverending paperwork.
“I started implementing automation gradually, so now we have fully-automated Flows for the Legal team to use daily,” Misha says. Today, the list of the most popular workflows includes the Mutual Non-Disclosure Agreement Flow, the Business Associate Agreement Flow, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act Flow, and others. “These Flows improve our time management and help us deal with incoming requests.”
According to Misha, most requests come from the Sales department: “When a salesperson brings in a potential customer, the Legal team’s duty is to examine all the risks and approve or reject a contract before signing it. Plus, we work with the Customer Success team that manages relationships with our existing enterprise and SMB customers. We are also involved in vendor management processes and more.”
The most frequently implemented use case: The Mutual Non-Disclosure Agreement Flow
In his new position, Misha started by automating document workflows that the Legal department deals with on a daily basis. Most of these documents are non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) signed with customers, external stakeholders, and employees.
“The MNDA Flow was the first Flow I designed,” Misha recalls.”There are 26 possible scenarios of what could happen within the MNDA Flow depending on the type of signatories. I needed to set up different conditions for it to run smoothly across all scenarios.”
Automating this Flow helped streamline the process for airSlate and made it more intuitive for customers who needed to countersign documents. Today, when the Sales team needs to sign an NDA, they no longer have to:
- spend hours on end exchanging emails with customers;
- explain how to eSign documents using signNow;
- contact the Legal team if a third party wants to make changes to the initial document.
“I’d say that this Flow saves up to 70% of the time that the Legal team used to spend on signing Mutual Non-disclosure Agreements. And not only the Legal team, it’s a timesaver for the Sales team, and other teams having negotiations with external stakeholders.”
— Misha Kuzemskyi,
Legal Ops & Automation Manager at airSlate
The Mutual Non-Disclosure Agreement Flow visualization
Results achieved with airSlate
“After I built my first MNDA Flow, the procedure for processing a document manually for this type of agreement vanished,” Misha says. “Now, we simply get notifications for two cases: when we need to sign the MNDA and/or when a client offers some adjustments to a document.”
Before this Flow, it took the Legal team more than five emails to finalize the process, not to mention the time needed for approvals and getting responses from third parties.
Mundane tasks, such as organizing the incoming documents, renaming them, saving them, and so on have now been eliminated. Since all of the documents are now processed, named, and saved automatically, the entire NDA documentation Flow can be handled by a single person.
“Automation saves so much time, that’s why I’m always keeping an eye out for anything else that can be automated.”
— Misha Kuzemskyi,
Legal Ops & Automation Manager at airSlate
No-code automation transforms the Legal industry
Misha believes that the principles of no-code automation overlap with the Legal industry — structure and logic. That’s why they work perfectly together.
“Back in the day, when I worked at my law firm, I realized that the industry and people working there were suffering from disorganization,” says Misha. “This may sound cliche, but this is how legal organizations and the labor market operate.”
“I was always drawn to things that could help me organize my working process and keep me focused on things that really matter. Automation features everything I need to take this routine off the backs of those processing legal documents.”
— Misha Kuzemskyi,
Legal Ops & Automation Manager at airSlate
‘Automate or you’ll lose to your competition’
The Legal industry is moving forward, so business efficiency largely depends on the pace at which customers are served.
“If you don’t keep up with the market conditions, you’ll lose to your competition,” Misha believes.
Imagine setting up logic for all your documents to go back and forth among your employees and even to your external customers without any action from your side. Hundreds of hours can be saved over the long term by taking manual work out of this process and streamlining it.
“Based on my experience, everything that involves signing, filing requests, and filling out forms can be easily automated.”
— Misha Kuzemskyi,
Legal Ops & Automation Manager at airSlate
Automation can even help contract negotiations by taking the manual email correspondence out of the process. It’s the perfect remedy for eliminating the most common bottlenecks in the Legal industry and clearing out the paperwork that just sits there and blocks Legal departments from closing cases or finalizing deals. Misha firmly believes that Operations Managers across different industries will only win by implementing document workflow automation into their day-to-day tasks.
Watch the video interview with Misha below:
