Cornerstone goes digital with a sharper solution

Now more than ever, legal teams are required to deliver a reliable and efficient way to get documents signed. The Legal and Compliance team at Cornerstone identified a need to overcome some of the challenges they faced with their manual-based paper signature process. Hear how the team accomplished this by implementing a Sharper Solution.

The challenge

As a business with an extensive estate portfolio, Cornerstone produces many documents (thousands) for signature. In addition to all those legal documents, our contract approval process also requires signatories from various teams to complete the procedure.

Often, the signing process would take longer than expected because it was paper-based and very manual, with documents often having to be manually passed around in person or via a scanned copy on email. With the process very paper-based, there was a heavy reliance on printers, scanners, paper and administrative resources.

Recognising the need to improve and work smarter, Cornerstone’s Legal and Compliance team looked for a solution that would help overcome some of these challenges.

The solution

The team identified that an electronic signature product that we could easily implement with Cornerstone’s current systems - would be the right solution to make the signatory process more quick, efficient and reliable. There was also a requirement to have a solution that we could access in real-time and remotely.

Trials with different products took place to test the best solution, and after a thorough review, Cornerstone chose Adobe Sign as our e-signature tool.

The project took about a year from the initial brief to the implementation. With support from Cornerstone’s IT team, Adobe Sign was seamlessly integrated. This Sharper Solution has been in use for a year and has delivered tangible benefits already.

Adobe Sign has made a significant difference to our document signing process. It’s a real game-changer – especially given the current climate we’re all working in! It now only takes us minutes to sign documents when it used to take days, and that makes a huge difference. With the drive for organisations to work more remotely, the ability to sign documents electronically enables us to carry out this key part of our legal activities better, faster and more securely.

Phil Warren, Head of Legal & Compliance, Cornerstone

Benefits

Since the introduction of Adobe Sign, we have experienced the following benefits:

• Improved Productivity – we have saved time by sending documents digitally to signatories, therefore reducing manual-based administration - what was taking days/weeks, is now taking minutes/hours.
• Better Governance and Security – we have improved our governance through enhanced audit trails and electronic data storage and can now securely move documents across teams for signing 24/7.
• Cost-savings – we have saved money through the reduction of paper, printing and postage costs.
• Become Greener – by reducing our need for paper and ink; we’ve made a better contribution to our ISO Environmental objective.
• Better Information – we have reporting to help us analyse performance and continue to improve our procedures.