The task: automating employment offer letters

When Whitney Lange joined the Human Resources department at Ogletree Deakins earlier this year to help improve operational efficiencies, her first assignment was to streamline the Firm’s employment offer letter process.

With fifty-three U.S. offices across thirty-one states, the HR team had approximately forty offer letter templates for a variety of positions, with multiple copies and iterations being stored on the team’s shared drive, and an occasional copy making its way to a local drive.

Ogletree’s employment offer letters also include a lot of variable data determined by the new hire’s job classification. Roles at the Firm are classified by whether the new hire is going to be general staff or legal staff; their title: summer associate, paralegal, junior associate, partner, of-counsel, etc; type of employment: intern, part-time, full-time, or temporary; and so forth.

Finally, each of these employment situations has its own particular set of conditions and contingencies requiring specific language to be included or excluded in the employment offer. For instance, there are different terms for options such as medical benefits, paid time off, variable compensation, relocation clauses, and others, some of which can vary by state.

Not only was it extremely time-consuming and tedious work for Whitney and her team to draft these specific employment letters with all of their variable details and conditions, it had become increasingly difficult to ensure consistency across the language in the documents. With people sometimes storing their own versions of documents on their local drives, the offer letter “templates” were becoming unwieldy in terms of maintaining quality and version control.

It’s a familiar story for many - documents that are repurposed across the firm or organization aren’t stored and managed with any thoughtful organization. There may be copies stored on people’s own computers or multiple outdated copies in the shared drive, eventually leading to a chaotic and resource intensive document management system.

The manual nature of this system also makes it fraught with the potential for errors (never a good look) and at the worst, can create liability woes for organizations.

The challenge: finding document automation that is robust AND user-friendly

To get ahead of this situation at Ogletree, Whitney first had to find a document automation tool that would effectively combine the forty offer letter templates into two: one template for general staff, and one for the legal staff. Fortunately, there were plenty of well-known options on the market that could easily handle that task.

The bigger challenge to overcome: not only did the software have to be robust enough to adapt to complex contingencies, it had to maintain simplicity for the user. With the HR team located in different parts of the country, it wasn’t practical to coordinate multiple team trainings and template updates. Ideally, they needed a “Ready, Set, Go!” approach, or as close as they could get, once the templates were rolled out.

Whitney was familiar with some of the legacy document automation programs like HotDocs, but she also knew these types of solutions were far too big for the problem she was trying to solve. She didn't want to have to hire outside consultants or coordinate IT resources. She just wanted to be able to automate her team’s offer letters on her own, make updates to them as needed, and store them in a centralized location to which everyone had access.

The solution: Woodpecker’s document automation for Word

To get started, Whitney did a quick Google search and found Woodpecker’s name among several other document automation options. After doing a bit of research, she decided to sign up for a 14-day trial of Woodpecker. According to Whitney,

“From billing to account management, the customer service was superior,” continued Whitney. “Our account manager was not only available whenever we needed, but consistently went above and beyond to ensure we were building the most efficient templates. Woodpecker saved us many hours, allowing us to give our attention to other projects.”

Before the Woodpecker employment offer letter templates were rolled out at Ogletree, there were roughly sixty different people who would work on offer letters - from drafting to reviewing to editing to executing a final copy. And the end-to-end process would take hours to complete.

By using Woodpecker, the HR team was able to consolidate the work and streamline the process. Now, three  individuals create all of the letters for every office, and they’ve reduced the time it takes to draft a letter from hours to minutes, with zero errors. 

And by storing the offer letter templates in Ogletree’s Document Collection (Woodpecker’s fully managed,  cloud-based template storage system) the templates can be accessed by anyone on the team, regardless of where they’re located.

Whitney is now fully confident that the letters are always consistent in format and language throughout all of their offices. Whenever revisions need to be made, they only need to be made to the master templates in the Document Collection and the changes are automatically propagated.

Although Woodpecker was designed to meet the needs of solo and small law firm attorneys, Whitney says that she would:

In fact, she has found Woodpecker to be incredibly useful for other HR documents, like employment verifications. She says, “I can simply pop in the name, start date, salary, etc. and populate a quick document and I can be confident I won’t miss any sections and can easily spot errors if needed.”

Working with Woodpecker, Whitney’s first project at Ogletree was an enormous success. Within a matter of weeks, the slow, resource-intensive process of manually creating offer letters transformed into a lean and efficient workflow, creating huge productivity gains for the team.

With its commitment to simplicity and to providing exceptional experiences to its customers, Woodpecker can help you succeed with your document automation initiatives, too.

You might also like