Want to know what kinds of projects I'm working on and what I've worked on in the past? Here it is. If you like something you see, feel free to reach out to me. justin@automateofficework.com or book a call.

Current (and potential) Projects

Project	Description
Outsourcing workflow	I already built a tool for analyzing the legal issues around whether work can be outsourced from one country to another. I recommended that this be expanded to include all other departments and their issues in one large workflow
Technology contracts	Intake, templates, playbooks, repository
Contract repository	A simple and elegant contract repository with nothing extra
M&A Platform	From deal hunting to acquisition with a focus on sensitive file management
IT Master Data	Tracking the many names for datapoints and converting them to a standard naming convention
Finance pricing platform	Currently finance has to go looking in multiple data sources and has to manually look at the history of the client. I propose we get rid of the manual work. Or at the very least streamline the process.
Legal Department RFP Platform	To solicit bids from multiple law firms for a matter
Workshop for a Legal Department	To point out all the pain points in the contracting process and align motivations among all the stakeholders

Past Projects

Project	Description
Regulatory Platform	I built an entire platform for the tracking and managing of all regulatory licenses and certificates globally. https://automateofficework.com/platform
Spreadsheet Killer	You know those spreadsheets that are created innocently to track data in a department? Then other departments want to add columns for their data? And then pretty soon you have a monster with hundreds of columns and hundreds of people who can edit your spreadsheet? Well, this spreadsheet should be a database. So I converted a legal team's global spreadsheet to a proper database system where all data points are properly validated. And some datapoints can trigger additional approvals from other departments who need to be in the loop. And then the system records their approvals and comments and we have a history of everything. Exactly as it should be. https://automateofficework.com/spreadsheetkiller
Department landing page	Show directory of all the department teams that exist with links to their SharePoints. Then show the department org chart. Then show a list of tools that exist. https://automateofficework.com/department_page
Org chart	Org charts are either really hard to work with (Outlook address book) or they are manually created and horribly out of date. My org chart automatically updates itself as people join and leave a department. Users can put a descriptive title of what they actually do. Like instead of "Senior counsel" it can say "Senior Counsel, Spain" with a team label above them like "Southern Europe Legal Team". System accounts can be hidden. https://automateofficework.com/orgchart
Biographies	Clicking on a person on the org chart takes you to their biography where they can share professional and fun things about themselves. SharePoint pages can also link to team member biographies.
Beautiful SharePoint Page Editor	I created a beautiful SharePoint page editor that makes beautiful SharePoint pages for teams. It has all the modules we wish existed. https://automateofficework.com/team_page. Watch the video at https://youtu.be/cHVrOT0drL8.
Access	SharePoint is all about sharing and controlling access to files. Often a random SharePoint will have a folder they want only "Legal" to have access to. Well who is in legal? It changes all the time. Normally, people indicate manually which lawyers they want to have access to their folder. The Org Chart module creates a list of everyone under the GC every week. This list can then be applied automatically to all the random folders that need to be accessed by "Legal" and update them. Super easy. See the article
Intake	I created beautiful intake forms for teams. Took about 10 hours each. So I decided to make a platform that creates intake forms. A team can create an intake form in about an hour with pointing and clicking. Requesters then fill in a form and the team reviewing is notified to view the filled in form. On that page is a history log where the team can leave comments and update the status of the request. Can upload newer versions of files. There's also a box where anyone wanting to be notified of changes in the request can subscribe to be notified. Now teams can get the exact information they need to do work. Work is recorded. And anyone wanting to be updated can just subscribe. Intake is not just needed for contract work. It's needed for any time you want a team to do something. Also, this isn't just a Legal problem. Every department has challenges with getting random emails asking them to do stuff. https://automateofficework.com/intake
Approvals	Ad hoc approvals come up all the time. Where do we store these approvals? They should not be emails in Outlook, but in a permanent system. This is also not just a Legal problem. Every department struggles with this.https://automateofficework.com/scenarios/approvals
File Transfer	Companies need to be able to receive sensitive files like birth certificates, passports. But we should NOT be receiving these by email. Because personal data needs to be able to be wiped from a system. Email backs itself up many times. So how do companies receive these files? My module is where you define members of a team. There is a button next to the team to generate a file request. This makes a place on the SharePoint to receive files only members of the team can view. An email goes to the outside person and they click a link taking them to an Azure page that has an upload button. When they submit files a notification email goes to the team members. They come to the SharePoint and review the files and delete them when done. Files are automatically deleted after maximum 90 days. Again, it's not just Legal that struggles with this.
Anti-AI chatbot	I made a dumb chatbot. Instead of using AI to gauge feelings, you can map out the journey people can go down. Like a phone tree menu. You can also allow the user to type random questions and to get a list of matching pages.
Mailing Lists	The simplest task can be so difficult. Your boss asks you to email a group of people in the department, say "all product lawyers outside the United States." You're in a department of 400 people. There is no list of these people. You have to go through each person manually to create the list. Here's how to stop this chaos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Hx1PLbDnzg https://automateofficework.com/scenarios/approvals
Photos	A platform for employees to submit photos to their company so the company can use them on the website and marketing material. A user tags the faces of everyone in the photo and tags photos with other meta data like location, type of worker, department, division, activity shown. The Communications team reviews the photo and sends it out for consents. Users get an email asking them for consent. If they don't give consent, faces are automatically blurred because we already have the coordinates of the faces. When all consents are completed the photo goes into a Photo library that can be used by Communications. They can then search for photos they want to use for a specific purpose. They also note on the photos page each time where and by whom the photo is being used. We then have an automation that runs each day looking to see if everyone in the photo still works for the company. If a person left, their face is automatically blurred in the library photo. And emails go to everyone who used the photo notifying them to take action if necessary. Watch the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDJepARHVaI.
Team Responsibilities	Teams usually divide work among team members. To the point that other members don't know everything that a team member does. Say I go on vacation for a couple weeks. An urgent request goes to my manager and he responds "I can't help you. Wait until Justin returns." Well, if I had written down all the things I regularly do and short instructions how to do them, then my manager would have a chance he could actually help. It also helps a manager see everything their team actually gets up to. My manager asked me to build this. And it is beautiful.
Templates	A template library that is just a network tree of folders is just asking for chaos. My tool shows the tree of folders in an Outlook panel. All files are read-only. When a user clicks on a file a local copy is downloaded to the computer and opened in Word and they edit a local copy. Super simple. A folder of documents can also be reflected onto a SharePoint page so business users have access to current versions of documents. There is then one copy of every file, but users can interface with the files in their own way. https://automateofficework.com/templates
Playbooks	I made a web platform that shows HTML versions of contract templates. Next to each paragraph are tabs for "Purpose", "Guidance" and "Legal". A user clicks on a tab and commentary appears below the paragraph. So now lawyers can answer all the repetitive questions we always get. "Purpose" is a plain English translation of the paragraph and what its purpose/strategy is. "Guidance" is how to fill in the template or how to get changes. And "Legal" is guidance only shown to the Legal team (We know who they are because the Org Chart generates a list of everyone). Playbooks are thus living documents. And users cannot download a dead copy. They also can't email it to the other side in a lazy way.https://automateofficework.com/scenarios/playbooks
Trainings	Ad hoc trainings take place all the time. So when you give a training over Teams, why not just record the video? Then put it on this platform where everyone in the Legal department can find them and get benefit from them? There's also a files section to upload PowerPoints and PDF's. There's also a comments section so viewers can give feedback to the training owner. Perhaps there are parts of the training that are stale and need to be updated.
Monthly reports	We define members of a team. The page then shows the to-do list of each member retrieved from Outlook tasks. Each member can then maintain a list of their "Top priorities" and "Things I need from my manager". So now the manager doesn't have to ask every member every single day "What are you doing? Do you need anything from me?" This then becomes the agenda for weekly team meetings. No more "around the horn". Instead: "Justin, that looks interesting. Can you tell me more?" It also keeps a list of everything I did for the month and populates the Monthly Report. We can edit the report together as a team and it creates a PDF for emailing to the general counsel. Also an archive of all past monthly reports and other legal teams can see them and reach out if there are opportunities for synergies.
Hours tracker	A team of 50 engineers approached me. They said they had to fill out statistics each month saying how many hours they spent on different projects. There were 30 projects possible. 30 projects X 30 days X 50 people = 45,000 data points. It was a nightmare for them to collect. So I created a calendar interface for them. Engineers go each day and choose a project from a drop-down and put in the hours spent that day. A manager then sees the aggregation of all these data points. People who didn't fill in anything for the month get a reminder at the end of the month to fill in data. The system creates a spreadsheet with all the data that can then be aggregated with all past monthly reports to be used in Power BI.
Billing Guidelines.	For sending out updated Billing Guidelines to hundreds of law firms every couple of years. Like amendments to the letter of engagement. It was a mess to keep track of all them in a spreadsheet and to keep track of changes negotiated and who was doing what in the team. On this platform, you upload a standard template of the billing guidelines for the year. You then upload a spreadsheet with law firm names, locations, and the primary contact and anyone who needs to be copied. This then takes the standard template and fills in the law firm details and creates a DOCX for every single law firm and makes a row of data in the SharePoint. A team member can make any updates needed to the DOCX or the law firm details and then send it out for signature. The law firm receives an email with a NON-signable copy of the DOCX (converted to PDF) and there is a link in the email for AdobeSign to send them the document for signing. They are instructed to email back if they have any questions (i.e., they want to negotiate). The team member can edit and re-send if needed from the system. The system keeps track of all versions. The law firm signs through AdobeSign and the signed PDF is automatically uploaded into SharePoint and the status meta data is updated to let us know it's fully signed. Statistics tell us what percent of documents are done at what state at any time. Automated reminder emails go to the law firms.
Events Calendar	A Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion team wanted to be able to show a calendar of their upcoming events on their SharePoint page. They wanted it to be small and beautiful. They wanted it to show all the employee resource groups (Black employees, Asian employees, Disabled employees, Women), but also so you could filter it to only see events for a given resource group. They also wanted to filter by location, see only events that are broadcasted online, and to filter by language of the event. I built all of this. Made a really nice editor so resource group editors could edit their own events. See the article at automateofficework.com/calendar
Department calls	The department had quarterly department calls. They recorded them and emailed the link after the call. I started collecting all the links with summaries and I made a list with the history of every call going back 10 years. For anyone interested. Because why not?
Chats	The department head and his top managers used to travel around the world meeting with local teams at least once a year in smaller groups. Then COVID hit and they couldn't travel. They wanted to meet with everyone over Teams, but they wanted to limit meetings to 10 people and they wanted to meet with random groups of people and so they would have like 20 meetings in a month and an employee was allowed to sign up for a maximum of 2 meetings. Outlook and Teams cannot put on these limit. Normally you just send out a schedule of events and anyone can sign up for any meeting. So they asked me to build a platform. I built it and it was beautiful. They wanted group chats to be informal with a fun subject, like "what super power would you like to have?" My platform showed the meeting hosts and list of people signed up. Clicking on a person took you to read their biographies. You click to sign up for a meeting and it sends you an invite in Outlook that puts the meeting on your calendar. The invite tells you to complete your bio and read everyone's bios before the meeting. So during the meeting you felt like you already knew everyone and everyone had a fun, social conversation.
Certificates of Conformance	A guy reached out to me. He told me every time the company sold something internally to another part of the company, he received a PDF "Certificate of Conformance" with the details of the transfer and a list of all the products. He had to sign the PDF and email it to a local team depending on the country. He signed the PDF by inserting an image of his signature. He did this 50-100 times a day and it took hours for him to manually do this Every day. He begged me to help him. I made an automation that listened to his emails. When he received a PDF with the right file name, my automation took the PDF and read all the lines of words. It then re-generated the document in HTML and inserted an image of his signature. The HTML was then converted to PDF and saved on SharePoint with all the details. He received a daily reminder to "sign" these pre-signed documents. So now he comes to a page that has a table with all these outstanding documents. He can click to see the original unsigned and signed versions. To the right of each is a checkbox. He can click each checkbox and then click "Sign all checked". Or he can scroll to the bottom and select "Check all". He can still click each for quality check, but now instead of hours of manual work, he can be done in two clicks. He was very grateful.
Consents	We had sales people who saw amazing results and they wanted to take pictures of customers and share them with the company. We needed customers to sign consents under GDPR and then be able to review any photos we had on file with them. I made a form on SharePoint for all the details including the customer's email address. This sent a document by email to them to sign digitally. We then had all consents in one repository. Customers could go to https://company-name.com/consents. There was a form where they type in their email address. The automation emailed them a list of their consents on file. They could download the signed PDF or click a link to "withdraw consent". If they withdraw consent an email went to the team that generated the consent and they had 30 days to remove the photo from wherever they were using it. They had a button to click when they were done. If they didn't click the button within 15 days, data privacy was brought in. If the person who generated the consent left the company, the request went to their manager. If the manager was also gone, the request went to the data privacy team. The data privacy team loved this.
Contracts	I created my own contracts repository visible inside Outlook for my department and in SharePoint for everyone else. It's huge and beautiful. It was the very first project I created. Read the article
Vendor Map	Department operations had a list of hundreds of vendors we used. Local department members constantly wanted to onboard new vendors. So we created a map of the existing vendors and their areas of expertise. Department members were told to first look on the map to find existing vendors that would fit the need. We also added evaluations so department members could leave notes about their experiences with the vendors.
Decision Tree	https://automateofficework.com/decision_trees. A stupid little tool that lets you easily create a decision journey with drop-down menus for any user. So instead of showing them a huge, confusing spreadsheet, take them down a simple journey of steps until you give them the final instruction of what to do next.
Diversity Survey	I built this in 2020 during the George Floyd riots in the US. Our department wanted to be able to talk about difficult things. And what everybody was going through. We came up with 20 different statements. Things like "I don't feel like I fit in". "People constantly mispronounce my name". We made a SharePoint page where people could anonymously pick a statement and post it to our Department Yammer. People could then leave public comments on Yammer or go to the platform and leave an anonymous comment. We wanted people to be able to have difficult conversations and everyone to be able to support them.
DocExchange	I started creating this. Exchanging documents with another party over email is absolutely stupid in 2024. It needs to be in a permanent platform where everybody can see everything and people who need to be notified when there is a new version can easily come and see it and all past changes. Did finance review this? Take a look. Does compliance have outstanding issues they need to resolve before I email this for signing to the other side?
Donation Requests	This is for all the requests from local baseball teams or from orphanages for small corporate sponsorships for local groups. Like your child's school, etc. Requests used to take 6 months of emails and now take maximum two weeks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it7M7WVcTGA
Happy Survey	You know at the end of a newsletter or an email they ask you to rate your satisfaction? We used to use an outside vendor for this. I turned it into a SharePoint platform with campaigns and satisfaction levels. No more having to pay an outside company.
Legal Entity Data	We used an outside company to store all the legal entity data. Documents, who was on the board, who had signing authority. So if a department member had a question when creating a contract, they first had to ask department operations to create an account for them. They log into the outside system to find details. Instead, I asked the outside company for API access. I then made a SharePoint page with a drop-down menu. The API filled in the drop-down menu with the list of all current entities. The user picks one and they just see the data they want to see. No need for department ops to create and maintain hundreds of accounts for people who just want to see little bits of information.
Ideas	I made an Ideas platform where anyone in the department could submit an idea, others could join in with the idea, and the team could post updates and documents about the development of their idea. https://automateofficework.com/ideas
Onboarding	I created an onboarding platform. New employees came to read all the information about all the different teams in the department. Each team could easily update their information as they changed. No more outdated team descriptions.
Compliance country regulations	Compliance came to me. They had a giant spreadsheet with columns of countries around the world and rows of compliance issues. In each box was what a sales person must do to comply in the country for that issues. The spreadsheet was much too big for any normal person to use. I gave them a drop-down box at the top of the page to only show one country at a time. We also made it so only compliance officers from that country could edit the data.
Product Documents	You know how when you buy a dishwasher you no longer get tons of manuals and legal documents, but instead there is a piece of paper pointing you to the manufacture's website where you choose your product and there is a list of all the documents and legal documents including things like patents and whatnot? That's what I built. It makes it so legal teams can update their legal documents at any time. There is then a history of all changes made to each document. We can then put links to these documents in our contracts instead of including 20 pages.
Restore	SharePoint can get crazy. A department network drive where everybody just stores whatever. That means anybody can edit anything. A person accidentally deleted a parent folder with 20,000 files. Yes, SharePoint stores deleted files in a recycle bin and you can restore files. But only one file at a time. A secretary spent a week undeleting 10,000 files and then came to me. I gave her an interface to filter the recycle bin and then a button to "Check all" and then she restored the remaining 10,000 files in one click.
Risk Assessments	Compliance keeps track of Risks in different countries by different categories. They then keep track of possibly multiple activities aimed to mitigate each risk. They had a giant spreadsheet for this. And it was crazy because you can't just let everybody edit that. The risk is high that people mess it up. So they had a full-time employee who was the gatekeeper of the spreadsheet. There's another problem here. Spreadsheets are best for 1-to-1 relationships. Like one risk to one activity. That's not the case here. So a spreadsheet doesn't work. I created an interface like Google Docs for this. The manager can see all data all at once as a giant spreadsheet. We then made it so each risk had its own dedicated page where a local compliance person could make edits. We tracked the edits and updated the master spreadsheet. See the article at https://automateofficework.com/scenarios/when_your_data_doesnt_fit_into_a_spreadsheet. Try out the demo at https://automateofficework.com/tools/sheets/demo/.
Signatures	Who can sign what is a major problem in large companies. The rules are different by country. and people constantly change. So who do you turn to to find out who can sign up? I made a page that had a table with countries and then a contact to reach out to. Ideally, this person should not be in legal, but somebody who is a country secretary or somebody in finance. This person was listed just to ask questions. I then gave this person a spreadsheet with all the rules of signing authority for them and I trained them in how to read the spreadsheet. These spreadsheets are too complicated to simply allow a common person to read them. They will mess up. I then told this signature manager that if they had any novel questions, they can reach out to legal or finance to get clarification. ******** Next, I made a button where authorized people could click to send out a NEW Document for E-signature. The problem with E-signature products is that they make a separate repository for each person. There is no way to see all documents. You also can't tag your documents with contract meta data. So when an authorized person clicks that button, they are brought to a NEW Document page. There is an UPLOAD button. They can upload DOCX or PDF. The page reads the document and shows a preview of the document. The page reads the contents of the document looking for signature lines, tagged like {{SIGNER1}} and {{SIGNER2}}. Below the preveiw are fields to type in the email addresses of each signer. Below that are all the normal options, like what to call the request, who to CC, what deadline, when to send chaser emails. Below that is a checkbox that says "This is a contract". If they check that, they are prompted to put in all the meta data about the contract. The person sends out the document for E-Signature and the system then catches the fully signed document. I then had a record of every document signed through the tool. Remember, not all documents are contracts. Other departments are also struggling with keeping track of their signed documents.
CorpSec requests	The CorpSec legal team approached me. They were receiving 500 emails a day asking for services. Each request became 2 weeks of back and forth. I instead used the Intake tool and we set up 200 standard forms of what requesters could ask for and the inputs required for each. The system then tracked the request to completion. They loved it.
Team Structure	This is for teams that want to be able to show a different kind of org chart on their web page. A mix of org chart and responsibilities listed for each team member. And it's easy to edit as a web page.
Surveys	So you want to be able to survey the legal department, but existing tools like Microsoft Forms don't cut it. Perhaps you want to cut and slice data across several survey campaigns and see how things are changing over time. I built this for my legal department.
Timekeeper Rates	Are you in charge of approving new rate requests from law firms? Perhaps the platform you use doesn't make it easy for you to see the history of each law firm's rates and how they compare to other similar law firms in the same area. This tool solves that.