.jpg)
Most organizations’ unique challenges come to the surface when they look closely at what’s bogging down the legal team. For D4C Dental Brands, that distinctive hurdle, which is also core to the business, is recruiting.
D4C’s recruiting challenges came down to contract management
D4C provides business management for pediatric dentistry and orthodontic practices, which includes marketing, operations, recruiting, and more. Essentially, the org owns practitioners’ day-to-day work and allows them to focus on what they’re passionate about — practicing medicine and caring for patients.
When he came on board, David Prado, D4C’s Associate General Counsel, found there was no contract management system in place, which meant a disorganized and inefficient recruiting process.
Prado shared, “Recruiters worked out of Word templates [for offers], which meant that some recruiters would copy and paste their own terms or change details without checking with legal. It was a long back-and-forth process when bringing on a new employee with too many cracks in the system for something to get missed — we make the offer, their credentials need to be verified, HR needs to set them up, and some steps need to happen with finance — which can all look different depending on the role we’re filling.”
Although the org grew an impressive 130% over the past two years, Prado acknowledges they could have missed opportunities for even greater growth because of the backup in the recruiting and onboarding process.
D4C’s lean team couldn’t justify the bulkiest CLMs on the market
Though he knew the right CLM could solve a lot of D4C’s challenges, the process of finding the right one was long. “My top priority was a good intake form template for document generation since we repeat our recruitment offer process multiple times daily. We also needed clean reporting and an open API,” Prado shared.
But the challenge wasn’t finding a CLM with the right capabilities. It was about finding the right fit. “We tested out the most robust, luxury CLMs on the market, but they were so expensive and offered all sorts of features that we may never need — and definitely don’t need now. The ROI wasn’t there — we needed something with the right tools, but it had to make sense from an ROI perspective.”
When I looked for CLMs, nothing satisfied our needs taking into account both our growth plans and where we’re at now — nothing felt like the right size or the right fit until we found Lexion.”
Finding the right fit with Lexion and winning at scale
A friend referred Prado to Lexion (like any good friend would), and he discovered it was just right. Prado said during the trial period, it became clear that the reporting capabilities would have a big impact on his organization's ability to standardize language in employment contracts. “We now have the ability to keep language consistent across a portfolio of contracts leveraging the clause library, where previously recruiters wrote their own terms, which cause a lot more manual tracking and oversight. Through standardization, we’ve seen an improvement in reporting, tracking, compliance, and operations.”
And once things got rolling, implementation was a breeze: “It only took a week or two to transfer all the documents.” He added, “We quickly saw the impact of having the right contract management system in place. Previously, when we made an offer to a new doctor, the back and forth process with the recruiter, getting markups from the doctor, reviewing, and vetting, all took about 7-10 days to draft and execute. Now, it’s possible to do in less than an hour.”
"Previously, when we made an offer to a new doctor, the back and forth process with the recruiter, getting markups from the doctor, reviewing and vetting, all took about 7-10 days to draft and execute. Now, it’s possible to do in less than an hour.”
And now the entire organization wants to reap the benefits of a new CLM. “More departments are asking for access to Lexion — they love the ability to generate fields and use them for building their own reports.” He also shared that D4C’s IT department already sees tremendous value using Lexion to catch redundant vendor contracts and avoid unwanted automatic renewals they might have otherwise missed as the company keeps pace with its rapid growth.
“From an ROI perspective, [the cost of Lexion] is a drop in the bucket compared to what we’re able to leverage from it. We’re winning two ways: We’re now able to win more opportunities that, before Lexion, we were losing because of workload management, and we’re saving money from efficiencies like reducing vendor redundancies or not letting contracts renew that need to end. Our legal team hasn’t expanded, but with Lexion, we can keep up with our organization’s growth.”
