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Supported the reduction in outside counsel spend by 40%
Recovered 10-20% of time for in-house legal team
Dramatically improved knowledge management and team collaboration
Cityblock Health, a rapidly growing healthcare startup, delivers innovative healthcare solutions while operating in a complex regulatory environment. The company’s accelerated growth came at a time when, like many companies, an emphasis on opex management and unit economics became critically important. Under the leadership of Wendy Chow, Cityblock Health’s General Counsel, the legal team began investigating different solutions to increase their scale ratios and as the age old adage goes, “do more with less.”
The legal team redesigned their service model, moving from a high-access to a high-prioritization model. During the steepest growth curve years, the legal team’s primary mission was to protect the company while proactively supporting all business innovation. In high-growth years, speed and quality were of utmost importance, and unfettered access to the legal team was critical to support Cityblock’s growing business. But in the past few years, the global markets and healthcare sectors have experienced significant turbulence, and opex and unit economics have become much more important. In a resource-constrained environment, the legal team shifted focus to a high-prioritization model, which granted differentiated legal resources to high-impact work so that legal work was focused on the most valuable business issues.
At the same time as the team was redesigning their service model shift, the legal tech landscape was booming with new technology, spurred by generative AI and the rollout of ChatGPT. The legal team conducted an internal audit and began seeking technology partners that could help them accelerate, innovate, and optimize their new legal framework while continuing to mitigate company risk and deliver high-quality legal support to the business.
After a comprehensive vendor search and learning process to scan the landscape of options, Cityblock Health identified Streamline AI as the sophisticated legal workflow automation and collaboration platform they needed to begin actualizing their strategic objectives. Through their exploration, Ms. Chow and team had honed in on the correlations between optimizing resource allocation, streamlining internal workflows, recalibrating outside counsel engagements, and modernizing their technology infrastructure. Cityblock Health selected Streamline AI for its ability to help optimize the legal team’s process to free up internal legal resources for more important work through legal workflow automation and improved collaboration.
By using Streamline AI as the central collaboration hub for all legal matters, and by establishing clearly defined Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and internal guidelines for legal engagement, the legal team was able to optimize resource allocation and free up an estimated 10-20% of time for the internal legal team, which allowed them to bring outsourced projects in-house and reduce outside counsel spend by approximately 40%, amounting to a significant opex savings for the company. This strategic shift not only reduced opex but also enabled the legal team to proactively contribute to Cityblock's innovation and business outcomes, demonstrating the power of technology to elevate legal operations from a cost center to a strategic driver.
Cityblock Health is an innovative, fast-growing company with a strong mission and highly engaged people involved on all sides of internal legal requests. The company is highly regulated and has enjoyed explosive growth over the last six years. Through an emphasis on operational efficiency, cost management and unit economics, the company had identified a strategic advantage.
During the company’s rapid growth, the legal team had been increasingly experiencing more incoming requests from the business, and an increase in diversity and complexity of requests. The talented team of internal lawyers had become maxed out on capacity and were increasingly relying on outside counsel to augment their efforts. Their work remained high-quality, but they lacked the data to sway the business to invest in growing the team and faced constant pressure to become more efficient and productive to keep up with the company’s growth.
This situation is similar to what many other legal teams experience, regardless of their company’s size or industry. Under the leadership of their General Counsel, Wendy Chow, Cityblock’s legal team had developed a strong reputation for being business centric and valuable thought partners, but in a resource constrained world needed to seek new ways to innovate the existing legal processes to do more with less and still provide the same level of service and risk mitigation the business had become used to.
“Today, it’s all about operational efficiency and managing your costs and your unit economics,” explained Chow. “Legal spend is often a very large part of the opex budget, and startups are no longer in the era of indexing for growth at all costs and worrying about EBITDA later. There isn’t an infinite pool of in-house counsel time, and our outside counsel fees have been increasing 10%+ year over year, with partner fees at times tracking above $1500 an hour. Outside counsel is a huge line item in the opex for businesses. Legal teams have to find new ways to innovate in order to keep up with the demand.”
They set a goal to reduce spending on outside legal counsel while maintaining the same quality and volume of work without overburdening the legal team.
To achieve this, they redesigned their service model, moving from a high-access to a high-prioritization model, and sought legal technology to help implement this new model by further improving the team’s efficiency and effectiveness and freeing up in-house resources for more critical work. They were also looking for tools that could help implement their new SLAs and legal prioritization. They hoped that recent advancements and the availability of better legal tech solutions in the market would surface during the search.
The efficiency challenges they identified and prioritized were:
Cityblock conducted a comprehensive search for an enterprise legal management software solution that could streamline its legal operations.
They evaluated more than 40 vendors in an exhaustive tech evaluation and selection process, exploring many different types of technology before ultimately shortlisting three and deciding on one.
Streamline AI was ultimately chosen for its ability to address multiple problems, its elegant focus on the needs of in-house legal teams, its user-friendly interface that maps to how lawyers think, and its robust automation and integration capabilities.
Key features of Streamline AI that addressed Cityblock Health’s needs included:
Streamline helped Cityblock Health to achieve a vision of finding an efficient way to become more productive, and it enabled the implementation of a new operating model that reduced operating expenses (opex) significantly.
“It helped us move from a high-access model to a high-prioritization model,” says Chow, “and that is how we’re talking about it internally.”
Cityblock has observed improvements in many areas that were the focus of their search, including:
“Streamline AI has been instrumental in helping us reduce outside counsel spend by approximately 40% in the past year,” said Chow, “which amounted to a significant cost savings for the company.”
“One thing we didn’t expect was how good the internal collaboration tool would be,” Chow continued. “If email and Slack were not already invented, and if I were to imagine designing a tool for lawyers to work and collaborate and to manage their work from scratch, then I’d invent Streamline first.”
“If I ever need something after hours, or if I just need to know the status of something quickly, I no longer need to ping people on the team and distract them from their task at hand. I can just go into Streamline, find the ticket, and look up the status or find the relevant document myself. It’s a wonderful tool for the GC because it gives a bird’s eye view without getting into the weeds of what everybody is doing at all times - it provides visibility without regularly requiring continuous updates.”
Streamline has excelled in its core functionality for Cityblock Health and has provided continuous improvement with regular enhancements.
“They are adding enhancements all the time and are very open to feedback about those enhancements,” Chow notes. “It gives me confidence and even reminds me of when Gmail was first rolling out when they would constantly be adding features that made it better and better without being asked, leaving me thinking, ‘This thing works really well for what I need,’ and then they would add subtle enhancements that left me thinking, ‘oh, that’s amazing’ or ‘that’s an interesting thing that they added’ or, simply ‘that’s great.’”
As Cityblock integrates all in-house matters and requests into the platform, it plans to use its improved data even more to assist with future, more informed budget discussions and phase out the manual, labor-intensive methods it has relied on.
They also have a vision for leveraging the institutional knowledge amassing within the Streamline platform due to more effective and consolidated communication about matters. Streamline provides a searchable history of projects, documents, and discussions, allowing easy access to information even if someone leaves the team or is unavailable.
Chow’s guidance to legal leaders with similar goals of improving operational efficiency and finding ways to reduce reliance on outside counsel:
“Streamline is a beautifully designed product for in-house lawyers to manage your workflow, give you transparency over the whole team’s work, and make your collaboration more efficient. It will help your team’s efficiency and workflow pains overall so that they can concentrate more on the actual important work.”
She continues, “And if you care a lot about process improvement, then when you get into Streamline, you’re going to think, ‘Whoa, this is a very interesting, beautiful tool.’”
As a final comment, Chow ponders, “What would you do with extra time? You’d turn your attention to working on the things you know you (yourself) should be working on, the higher-risk stuff that no one’s asking you to do. And if you’ve been paying for that work to get done with external help because you can only do that work if you had more time and space, then you’ll find that once you’ve managed your throughput, you can handle many of those projects internally, thus reducing outside counsel spend. You have more space and time for bigger and better ideas, and frankly, also for your team to rest and protect against burnout.”
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