Word & Brown Companies is an American player in the field of health insurance, offering innovative solutions and exceptional service to brokers, employers and individuals across the United States. With a strong focus on operational efficiency and compliance, the company continues to make significant improvements in benefits delivery.
A Legal Suite customer since 2016, Word & Brown uses several key modules of the platform, including the Collaborative Portal for effective management of requests, the Contract management module to streamline and optimize the contract lifecycle, and the tool Advanced configurator for adapted customizations.
We had the pleasure and the opportunity to speak with Kevin Mack, a Paralegal Supervisor at The Word & Brown Companies, who shared his experience using Legal Suite and the tangible benefits it has brought to their legal department.
Kevin Mack
We chose Legal Suite over other competitors based on ease of use and appearance, but also because of the Open Law Portal module itself, which plays a crucial role in facilitating interactions with our internal customers. The platform grants requesting departments direct access to submit and track their requests. This facilitates streamlined collaboration and eliminates the inefficiencies associated with email-based communication. These are the main reasons why we went with Legal Suite.
At the beginning, we used two main modules: one for managing requests and another for contracts. Over time, we realized how convenient it was to have everything integrated into a single platform.
Kevin Mack
We originally started using Legal Suite in2016, and it was a very different-looking product than it is now. Our business model required a bit more creativity and out-of-the-box thinking in terms ofhandling the challenges we faced. The migration from the 2018 software version (the version we started with) to the 2022 version was a major undertaking. That said, I expect future updates to be fairly minimal, which is great for us. I think going forward, every update will be pretty nominal, which is great for us!
Lastly, I think the best part was when startedusing the Advanced Configurator tool. Since our business model is changing as time goes by, the Advanced Configurator allows us to make those changes ourselves which has been a big boost on our side. I would highly recommend getting the advanced Configurator along with the product.
Kevin Mack
Legal Suite, as it is today, as made a real difference in our daily work. We’re now able to create reports more efficiently and actually use them on a daily basis. That’s been a huge help in eliminating inefficiencies.
For example, we maintain a daily active projectslist that we review every morning during our briefing — in fact, that’s what Iwas in earlier. We have a chart that we update constantly and being able togenerate that same chart directly as a report, using the data we regularlyinput for our contracts, has been incredibly useful. It has significantly improved our department’s overall efficiency, freeing up more time to focus onother priorities. So that’s been a great plus.
I also really like the search functionality. As we input more contracts and include more detailed information in each file, we can generate targeted reports and quickly find similar files. If a question comes in from the business side, we can locate the relevant contract right away, and that makes things much easier for us.
Kevin Mack
Since we’re in the health insurance space, I can only speak to improvements in ourinternal processes, but they’ve been significant. As I mentioned earlier, the reporting functionality has really boosted our efficiency.
I’d estimate we’re saving up to two hours a week just by being able to automatically update our reports. Previously, we were duplicating efforts, we’d update our project chart in a Word document and then have to manually transfer that information elsewhere. Now, everything is integrated, and that redundancy is gone. That time savings makes a big difference, especially right now, as we’re going through some business model changes. We’re handling a much higher volume of requests, and the efficiency gains from Legal Suite are helping us manage that increased workload more effectively.
Kevin Mack
LegalSuite has been great for us as a contract repository. We’re not missing any contracts; everything is stored in one place.
If there’s ever an issue with an invoice, a quote, or anything like that, we can go straight to Legal Suite and easily find the original agreement. I can’t really speak to versioning because we’re not using the system in that capacity, at least not yet. But in terms of having a reliable, centralized location for all of our contracts, it’s been very effective.
Kevin Mack
Yes, after a recent update, I noticed that I could no longer access my contract files. I could click on the links but nothing loaded. I contacted your support team via the ticket platform.
I was able to speak with a few members of your team, who guided me through various steps. They helped me identify the problem preventing files from being displayed, and once resolved, everything went back to normal. It's a good example of how quickly your support team helped us resolve a problem.
