Sydney, Australia – October 12, 2021 – Australian process automation technology company, Checkbox, has announced that Telstra’s legal team used its platform to design and create a digital front door for all legal engagement, and automate a series of low-risk legal processes. Checkbox’s no-code platform has helped restore almost 4,000 hours in productivity, and increased lawyers’ capacity to focus on strategic counsel, negotiation, and other complex work.

Since launching its T22 strategy, Telstra has focused on optimising its operations and how employees work, and is enhancing the use of digital technologies among its almost 30,000 staff to achieve this goal. This includes departments and lines of business that may not have traditionally capitalised on its benefits.

Scott Smalley, the Innovative Service Delivery Lead for Telstra’s Sustainability, External Affairs & Legal team, said that for Telstra Legal, a key priority was finding a way to leverage automation with tools that can trigger a cultural change.  

Telstra selected Checkbox to give its legal team a full suite of no-code app development features in a single platform. Lawyers can build feature-rich legal apps and services through an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop user interface, eliminating manual processes and legacy workflows.

Telstra initially deployed Checkbox to automate a series of specific use cases, and the effectiveness of the platform inspired Telstra’s lawyers to scale up and use it to develop an app named Engage Legal, a front door for all legal requests.

“A number of industry pressures moved us from our old model of lawyers dedicated to specific clients, to a more centralised one – where a broader pool of lawyers could pick up new matters coming through the door” said Smalley. “We needed a digital tool to be that door, and Checkbox is a key piece in enabling us to deliver legal services in this new way.”  

Engage Legal allows business stakeholders to provide information to the legal team through a guided questionnaire covering all potential scenarios. Engage Legal then uses that data to route the client to the appropriate resource, whether that’s an automated self-service tool, or a lawyer.

Most of the automated self-service tools recommended by Engage Legal have also been created with Checkbox, including non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), variation and novation agreements, and memorandums of understanding (MoU).  As time goes by, Telstra’s legal team will continue to investigate the automation of more complicated agreements, such as its standard technology procurement contracts.

The next priority for Telstra is building a tool to speed up the ability to advise on product exits, which has become a higher priority as Telstra goes through a radical product simplification drive.  

“Telstra has thousands of products across our fixed, network and services brands.  Advising on these exits in our traditional way would be impossible.  We need a way to efficiently get instructions, look for patterns, provide automated guidance where we can, and pick out the priority situations to have lawyers engaged.  It just never would have occurred to me a few years ago that building apps could help in this situation, but Checkbox has been amazing.” said Smalley.

Checkbox has helped modernise how Telstra’s legal team works, and the company aims to expand the platform and the benefits it delivers to Human Resources (HR), Sustainability and Accounting teams.

For example, Telstra HR has developed an app with Checkbox that has automated thousands of employment agreements, including new contracts as departments and roles change. Employees can now complete their contracts through a secure digital portal, pre-populated with information for their role, and a cover letter containing advice from HR experts to make the process simple. This has enabled Telstra HR to meet time-sensitive deadlines while improving the employee experience when engaging with HR processes.

“Like their professional services counterparts, legal teams are transforming, and having a tool which is intuitive is a defining characteristic to ensure it’s used by both the legal team and their business clients,” said Evan Wong, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer at Checkbox. “As Telstra Legal takes an increasingly strategic role in an expanding enterprise, Checkbox’s no-code process automation allows it to focus on the high-value and complex work, with the assurance the grunt work is being completed.”

About Checkbox

Checkbox is an award-winning, no-code software platform which allows users to build their own business solutions that automate high-volume, low-value expert tasks and free up employees to focus on higher value and strategic work. Apps are built using Checkbox’s intuitive drag-and-drop interface, which requires no technical knowledge. This empowers users to create and deploy apps in hours, not months, without writing a single line of code. For more information, visit www.checkbox.ai.

About Telstra

Telstra is Australia’s leading telecommunications and technology company, offering a full range of communications services and competing in all telecommunications markets. In Australia, they provide 18.8 million retail mobile services, 3.8 million retail fixed bundles and standalone data services and 960,000 retail fixed standalone voice services. For more information, visit www.telstra.com.au

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