Webinar report: Turning chaos into managed data

Email was never designed to manage work; spreadsheets were never designed to run departments.

Yet, over time, both have taken on roles way beyond those intended. To a point where today, instead of empowering us to greater productivity, they take up to 75% of our time through avoidable, repetitious tasks.

To demonstrate how we can dial down the administrative noise, Justin Turman and Steve Bynghall returned to CLL with a follow-up webinar to November 2025’s Process – getting the most out of AI.

Turning chaos into managed data: the death of the inbox and the spreadsheet focussed on three key pillars of managing work within the in-house legal team:

• Ending the request email;
• The self-service revolution; and
• The end of the spreadsheet tracker.

Chaos starts with unstructured requests

And those unstructured requests invariably take the form of email. Someone wants a contract review, has a regulatory query or wants to onboard a new supplier. No two requests follow a consistent format in terms of the what, the why, the who or the when.

It gets worse. Because what then follows is an endless chain of emails to scope the job, allocate the work and agree outcomes, budgets and deadlines, etc.

The antidote to this is a system that captures all the information you need – and none of extraneous detail you don’t – without a single email reaching your inbox. A system that then enables you communicate progress on the project to everyone concerned - free from the downsides of spreadsheets, which include:

• Data visibility – everyone can see everything whether it’s relevant to them or not;
• Uncontrolled edits – anyone can add or change anything, including by accident;
• Data is unvalidated – people can type whatever they want;
• No access control – you can’t restrict what is visible or editable;
• No history – you can’t see who added what or when; and
• Lack of accountability – you can’t tell when people are simply updating their rows on a spreadsheet while others are ignoring the entire document.

Enter your new system, which replaces email and spreadsheets with an interactive, web-based workflow tool.

The maturity ladder

This doesn’t mean, however, that the system can’t start with the trusted paper form.

Indeed, this is rung one on ‘The maturity ladder’, Justin’s formula for transitioning from chaos to ordered workflow management. Use a paper form to design the means to capture the essential information you need – in the format you want it - at the initial stage.

Rung two is where you go digital with a Word document or PDF that people can type onto and return to you if they prefer.

Rung three introduces conditional logic. For example, if the answer to question 1 is option A, only questions related to option A will follow and non-relevant sections will be hidden.

At the top of your maturity ladder is rung four, the web-based platform that automates workflows and tracks progress in real time.

Minimise form fatigue

• Keep questions hyper-relevant and specific to the matter in hand.
• If possible, enable your form to collect data from other functions (e.g. procurement, finance) to avoid duplication of effort.

Why web-based?

Maintaining your workflow management and tracking on the web gives you four key advantages over email and spreadsheets:

• It’s always current – people always see the latest version;
• Navigation is intuitive – people can get to what’s relevant to them fast;
• Data is secure – the asset can’t be shared in the same way spreadsheets and emails can be forwarded, which helps protect your IP; and
• It’s a living document that evolves with ongoing learnings.

Next, you can tailor the system to the needs of all stakeholders by adding layers across your web-based playbook. These can take the form of tabs in any given document that open content for discrete audiences. For example:

• Purpose tab - provides self-service information and explanations for non-legal people, obviating multiple emails;
• Guidance tab – setting out changes and constraints, such as local regulatory guidelines, to inform and support sales, marketing, finance teams, etc; and
• Legal tab – containing notes such as legal strategy, escalation thresholds, historical context and more.

Building your workflow templates

This is a team event, and it hangs on getting everyone aligned. For instance, when writing a service agreement, two or more lawyers are likely to have varying interpretations of the same clause. Take time to get consensus because without it, people across the organisation can get different answers to the same question depending on which lawyer they asked. Which leads to more emails between legal and internal clients seeking clarity.

The flip side, however, is that once you’ve been through this process once, 500+ conversations no longer need to happen.

Look at template management as an initial ground-laying process. Start with your most requested services and build out from there. That way, you’ll be maximising the value of the self-service functionality from the word go.

Remember that, although the final iteration of your workflow solution may resemble a spreadsheet, it works differently beneath the skin. Gone is the rigidity of functionality and access to everything for everybody. In their place are structured records, approval processes and data points with unique identities. You can also, of course, provide tiered access levels for different people and notify designated people of changes relevant to their field of work.

A word on tech

You don’t need to buy any new software to get started on your workflow system. Use whatever tools you already have, i.e. MS Office, SharePoint, etc. Later on, you can train AI tools to further automate workflow tasks but remember, workflow is more a mindset than a technology package.

Start automating the mundane and focusing on the extraordinary today

Start your journey out of chaos with a simple first step. Any of these three opening moves will get the ball rolling:

• Create an intake form (on paper) for your most chaotic service request;
• Schedule a playbook session with your team for your most-used template; or
• Identify which spreadsheet you’ll replace first.