Legatics The great thing about integrations is that one of the key tools your customer is looking for has already been built, and they’re probably already using it – so all you have to do is build the integration. Easy, right? Not so fast, or so I’ve learned.
At Legatics we strive to put our users at the heart of our design to provide legal transaction experiences that everyone loves. That’s our vision. It guides everything we do. And it means when we build an integration, our users tell us how it should be done. And boy do they tell us.
HM Land Registry recently issued draft practice guidance setting out the basis on which electronic signatures would be accepted in conveyancing, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to reflect on Legatics’ recent DocuSign integration and some lessons I’ve learned from the process.
Never assume that your users don’t know what they want
I’ve written before about how our lawyer users have surprised me with their feedback on our product, and the same goes for their eagerness to contribute to the integration process.
Our product team worked carefully with a number of lawyers to understand how a DocuSign integration on our transaction management platform should work for them, what it should look like and how our users would be, well, using it. Here are just a few examples of how we have designed the integration to work for them.
- When using the signing and completion tool on Legatics, our platform takes you directly to DocuSign when you create an envelope (or electronic signature pack) – this is because our users want to take full advantage of the useful features that DocuSign are constantly introducing in the prepare / tabbing screens, as well as specific DocuSign features and templates included in their own firm accounts, meaning it can be used across different jurisdictions. We get it.
- From Legatics you can send your documents directly to DocuSign and automatically import signatories from your transaction to your envelope, as well as import an email template – this is because our users wanted us to make the creation of an envelope as smooth and simple as possible. No problem.
- Legatics will always import the user who sent the documents to DocuSign as the last person in the signing flow – this is because our users wanted to have an automatic ‘quality check’ at the end of the signing flow. Sure thing.
If we had started building the integration without talking to them first, we would have wasted a lot of time and effort, thinking we knew what was best.
Understand why you have chosen to do things a certain way
When we speak to our users, not only do we show them how a tool works, but we explain to them why it has been designed the way it has. That means understanding the conversations behind the integration process, the pitfalls that we were anticipating and trying to avoid, the ease we were building into the functionality.
Working in Customer Success this is one of the key things I’ve learned that makes all the difference to our relationship with our customers. At Legatics we are obsessed with our product – we know it inside out, if you have a question about the platform we’ve heard it before (sometimes we’ve even asked it ourselves!) and know exactly how to guide you through the solution.
How do we ensure that this is the case? We do demonstrations to each other within our own teams, we speak to our users constantly and ask them questions, we follow the product roadmap and understand what features or integrations our developers are working on and why.
When we are in a position to talk through the functionalities in this way, we help our customers in ways they didn’t expect – and the great surprise has been that not only have many of them seen this integration as an opportunity to improve the adoption of Legatics on transactions, but they have also seen it as a chance to increase DocuSign confidence and ease of use within their teams.
Get some love before you go live
Testing and feedback is important, of course. It’s the last step. So invite your users to come in first, give them the key, and build the integration together.
Only then, if our users tell us they love how something is working, do we set it free.
If you are interested in learning more about our DocuSign integration or would like to see a demonstration, please get in touch with the Legatics team at info@legatics.com.
