How Elastic Cut NDA Turnaround by 87% Without Buying a CLM

Elastic's legal team had no reliable way to capture, track, or measure the requests coming into legal, and the contracts that did make it through were taking nearly a month to close.

Every legal team has a version of this story. Requests come in from every direction, a Slack message here, a Salesforce notification there, an email chain that somehow became the official record of a negotiation. And before long, the legal team is operating as a kind of institutional black hole: work goes in, and the business has no idea what's happening on the other side.

That was the reality at Elastic. The problem wasn't that the legal team wasn't working hard. It was that none of that work was visible. There were no reliable metrics on how many requests were coming in, what types they were, how long they were taking, or which ones were outliers that needed attention. Without that data, capacity planning was guesswork, and making the case for resources was nearly impossible.

Contracts made the problem concrete. Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). The bread and butter of any tech company's commercial motion, were taking an average of 23 days to complete. However, this wasn’t because the legal review itself was slow. In fact, when the review finally happened, it was often pretty straightforward. The problem was everything that came before it: the back-and-forth over whose paper to use, the emails going unanswered, the negotiation about the negotiation. In many cases, up to 20 of those 23 days were consumed before anyone had even looked at the contract itself. Meanwhile, sales cycles stalled and deals waited.

The problem showed up at the other end of the deal cycle too. Resellers needed letters of authorization (LOAs) to close transactions, a document that confirmed they were an authorized Elastic partner and had passed the necessary compliance checks. The information to generate that letter already existed in Salesforce. But the process to actually produce it was entirely manual, and it took two days. At the end of a quarter, with deals on the line and the clock running down, two days was a long time to wait.

What Elastic needed wasn't just a faster process. They needed a fundamentally different one that could bring order to the front door of legal, give the business visibility into where things stood, and route the right work to the right place without requiring her team to touch everything that came in. The question was how to get there without asking the business to overhaul the way it worked.

"When we looked at the data, we realized it sometimes took up to 20 days just deciding whose paper we'd use. That sounds ridiculous, but it was happening."

With Checkbox as its legal front door and workflow engine, Elastic transformed contract turnaround times, unblocked revenue at critical moments, and repositioned legal as a proactive partner to the business.

The results were immediate and measurable. NDAs that used to take 23 days now take three. The self-service workflow Elastic built in Checkbox, giving counterparties four structured options for how to engage with the contract, shifted the mix decisively toward first-party paper, and eliminated most of the back-and-forth before it could begin. Lawyers' time is now reserved for the reviews that genuinely need them.

The LOA transformation was just as striking. What had been a two-day manual process now takes only two minutes. Checkbox pulls the relevant compliance data directly from Salesforce, confirms the checks have been completed, and issues the document automatically.

Legal went from being a potential blocker at the most critical moment of the sales cycle to being invisible in the best possible way. The deal just gets done.

The impact has compounded beyond the legal team itself. When legal starts solving problems the business actually feels, the business notices. Other departments began asking the legal team whether Checkbox could solve their operational challenges too. Legal had built something that worked, and the rest of the organization wanted in.

"It shows legal as a partner. We're not only solving legal problems, we're solving the sales ops problems as well."