How Hines Found an Easier Path to CLM Success with Checkbox

Hines’ legal team needed to support a growing business without hiring more people or giving up the way they worked best.

As Hines expanded its global real estate footprint, its legal department needed to keep pace. With 45 team members supporting operations in more than 30 countries, the team needed to scale its impact without increasing headcount. Early on, several challenges stood out:

• Business users saw legal as difficult and cumbersome to engage with, leading to disorganized communication.
• Without a top-down mandate, the team had to prove technology’s value and show it made legal easier to work with, or risk low adoption and wasted effort.
• Hines found that CLMs lacked the flexibility of a no-code platform to customize contracting workflows around their own processes, starting with NDAs.
• Document templates were housed in shared folders, versions were hard to track, and everything ran through email, which caused delays and frustration.

Together, these factors made it difficult for Hines’ legal team to deliver a consistent, efficient experience while keeping up with the pace of the business.

They wanted to introduce automation, but without having to rip up their internal processes. They didn’t want to force the business or legal to work differently just to fit the software. Instead, they needed a solution that could mirror their ideal way of working and scale with their internal complexity. In other words, Hines was looking for a system that fit into their processes rather than forcing them to adapt.

With Checkbox, Hines built a scalable and modular approach to contract lifecycle workflows that boost efficiency, compliance, and adoption.

Since implementing Checkbox, Hines’ legal team has achieved major gains in efficiency, adoption, and scalability. Their initial focus, the NDA process, is now automated and standardized, proving the value of a modular, flexible approach to legal technology. For Hines, the adoption of this approach was a necessary level up. As the business grew, the legal team needed to move faster and handle more without additional headcount. Checkbox gave them the ability to scale impact while continuing to demonstrate clear value to stakeholders.

Checkbox has also enabled the legal team to operate as a more strategic partner to the business. By focusing on making processes user-friendly for their internal clients, they drove adoption and engagement across the organization. This approach encompassed simplifying complex legal language into business-friendly terms, while still maintaining the rigor of legal requirements, striking a balance between accessibility and compliance.

"With Checkbox, NDA automation is a much cleaner process. It's so much easier to find things and see who's working on what."