Snowflake brings data-driven business to legal operations

Data ties the organisation together 
Snowflake delivers the Data Cloud—a global network where thousands of organisations mobilise data with near-unlimited scale, concurrency and performance. Data seems to grow exponentially by the day, and organisations across all industries are challenged to gather, digest, store and ultimately turn that data into insights for the business. Snowflake helps its customers derive greater value from their data—to make decisions, uncover opportunities and inform solutions. Snowflake’s stated goal is to enable every organisation to be data-driven, resulting in better business outcomes for its customers.

Being data-driven is core to Snowflake’s customer value proposition and is essential to its operations as a business. Snowflake pushes itself to use data to ensure that every part of its business can meet the growing demands of its customers. Snowflake maintains its own centralised data marketplace to collect data and draw insights from across its business. It uses this data to underpin collaboration—informing decisions at the intersections of functional need. It intentionally steers away from solutions that create silos within any one department or function, instead utilising service-based systems to increase the ties across the organisation.

Snowflake needed to optimise its legal operations using data to drive integrated insights and cross-functional collaboration. Legal operations identified the need for an enterprise-ready platform that could integrate with and complement existing technology, as well as a solution that would track data for broader business use and specific legal needs regarding request management and business enablement. With these capabilities in place, the legal operations team would have the data and insights needed to make better day-to-day work decisions and to grow long-term value for the organisation.

Improving business performance with legal operations insights
Already familiar with ServiceNow’s IT Service Management (ITSM) solution, Snowflake anticipated that ServiceNow’s Legal Service Delivery (LSD) solution would meet its needs for functionality and fit into its existing technology ecosystem. It implemented LSD as a foundation for its automation efforts, embarking on a two-year journey to streamline legal requests, increase efficiency and enhance business value.

Snowflake started with LSD’s Stock Preclearance application. As Snowflake had recently become a publicly traded company, there would be an immediate and pressing need to assist employees interested in selling equity shares. The existing process was manually intensive. It involved sending email requests to the corporate legal team, which became overwhelmed with requests and was inefficient in its responses. Within one month of LSD’s implementation, Legal was able to fulfil these preclearance requests faster and more efficiently, reducing the response time by hours. Business stakeholders experienced first-hand the potential of a modernised legal operations function, which cleared the path for the legal team to implement workflows for other parts of the function.

Snowflake then moved to modernising the legal team’s support for business procurement. Again, the business previously made these requests by direct email. Legal was struggling to keep pace, often losing requests in the shuffle and seeing delays measured in weeks. Snowflake implemented another LSD workflow that put service-level agreement (SLA) tracking into place. Aaron Bromagem, Senior Director, Legal Operations, Snowflake that put service-level agreement (SLA) tracking into place. The legal operations team used the data captured from this workflow to quickly identify several issues causing delays. It took action to correct these issues, including shifting resources, standardising request templates and optimising Legal’s portion of the work.

Overall, LSD helped Snowflake capture valuable new data on legal work—just as intended. The legal operations team has used some of this data—such as data related to business demand and operational efficiency—to improve its own efforts. It has also shared this data into Snowflake’s enterprise-wide data marketplace for use by other functions across the business. As a result, Snowflake has been able to analyse this data to develop insights on business performance. For example, Snowflake used compliance data to refine its third-party screening process. Data captured by LSD was used by a third-party risk assessment team to better evaluate the risk of vendors, customers or partners.

Measuring impact 
With LSD, the legal operations team has gained greater visibility into the mechanics, execution and cadence of the way Legal does work. These insights enabled the team to implement additional workflows that increased cycle efficiency, identify hidden issues and resolve delays in request execution.

Efficiency 

• Greater responsiveness. Moving requests out of email reduced response time and lost requests. New workflows and automation enabled Snowflake to better manage the time and flow of legal requests, reducing turnaround time dramatically (the time to approve vendors for procurement dropped by approximately 60%).
• More efficient work. Leveraging features like service-level tracking, Legal can more effectively determine where and when requests get hung up, address bottlenecks quickly and disaggregate issues rising in other parts of the business from those in Legal. After deploying the Stock Preclearance workflow, cycle times decreased from hours to minutes.

Value

•  Enhanced stakeholder trust. Deployment of capabilities such as ServiceNow’s Stock Preclearance workflow puts time back in the hands of employees, generating appreciation, trust and the licence to go farther. It also improved reduced compliance risks and accelerated legal SLAs. 
• Greater insight. Use of the product has increased the type and volume of data linked to the data marketplace, enabling other areas of the business to identify and act on concerns. For example, reporting capabilities are surfacing issues such as the lack of anticipated volume for export compliance. This type of screening identifies issues before audits to help partners address noncompliance with the business.

Looking forward 
As Snowflake’s legal department moves forward in its journey to better manage service delivery, it plans to explore how it can further utilise LSD to improve the services that it provides to other functions (e.g. HR). It believes the integration of LSD could optimise the ways legal practitioners communicate—with each other, with their clients and within their own workflows—making related work processes more agile. Additionally, Legal will continue to supply Snowflake’s internal data marketplace with new data as it works toward deploying six new workflows in the coming months.

Snowflake, a technology company steeped in the most advanced uses of data analytics, used ServiceNow’s Legal Service Delivery solution to drive improvements to its own efficiency and to drive greater value from its legal department for the organisation. The legal team can now operate proactively with the business to optimise requests, find efficiencies and define new, better ways of working. Legal operations has built a partnership with the business based on a proven track record of meaningful, data-driven insights.

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