After putting all your templates into a template library and then aligning them to bring the number of them down, the next thing you'll want to do is to create playbooks for your core templates.

Playbooks about templates allow you to answer the basic questions that get asked all the time:

1. What does this legalese mean? Can we just get rid of it? What is the point of this?
2. This part is highlighted in yellow. What do I have to put here? Or the other side wants to change the language. Can we change it? This is a finance term. How can we get this finance term changed?

This tool allows you and your team to write down the answers to all the basic questions so you don't have to spend time on them again. The business can self-serve where possible.

This tool has several advantages over writing your playbook in a Word document or Excel spreadsheet. First of all, it just looks nicer and is easier to use. It looks like your original template, but now there are colored tabs on the right side. The user clicks on a tab and commentary appears below the paragraph. The user is not overwhelmed with information, but sees the information they need for the specific paragraph they have a question about.

Another advantage is that playbooks are not downloadable. Wait, that's an advantage? Yes. It forces users to always come to the latest version of the playbook. You see, playbooks are living documents. If a user asks a novel question, you can always go to the commentary and click on the Pencil icon to update the commentary.

Another advantage about the playbooks not being downloadable is that sales can't just download your playbook and email it to the other side. Security.

This sounds like a way to eliminate 90% of emails. Sign me up! Okay, so how do we create a playbook? First we go to the home page of the Playbooks tool.

Normally, you would not send your users to this home page, but directly to a specific playbook's URL. Here, anyone in your organization can create a playbook because playbooks are useful for answering questions about any document. You click on +New Playbook and you give your playbook a Team and a Title. These can always be changed later. You by default are the owner of your Playbook. You can click the Edit button and change any properties of your Playbook. I've created a new playbook called "Demo". Create your new playbook and click on its link in the list. A unique ID is created for your playbook so a URL like https://automateofficework.sharepoint.com/sites/legal/playbooks/playbook.aspx?id=2 is created.

Our playbook is completely empty. Users can click on "Playbook details" to see the team, owner, and list of editors. Clicking on the Question mark icon opens a help document to learn about the Playbooks platform.

Now since you are the owner of the Playbook, you have a "+" button. Click it to add a paragraph to your playbook.

A default paragraph is added with the words "Text". You can hover over the paragraph and click it and it becomes editable.

Your paragraph is now editable. You can change the indentation, make it centered, make it bold, underlined, or italicized. By default you will have tabs to the right of the paragraph. You can hide these tabs. And there is an HTML help link that will show you how to make a portion of text highlighted in yellow or how to make a extended space between a heading and the start of the next sentence.

I made my first paragraph into a Title for the document. You notice there are no speech bubbles on our tabs to the right because there is no content in them yet.

Click a tab. The Purpose tab is meant to explain to the user the plain meaning of the text and the purpose for the paragraph. The Guidance tab explains how to get changes to the text or if there are yellow highlights what they need to fill in. And the Legal tab is a tab that is hidden from most users and is only visible to members of your department. Because while you may be the owner of the template, the guidance might tell users to reach out to their "Legal counsel" for help. Members of your department will also want to send emails to you and these are emails we want to stop. So we provide training in this tab for them.

Clicking on the Pencil icon to the left of the commentary makes the commentary editable. I've typed in the beginnings of some useful comments about the Title of the document. When commenting on the title of a document you can tell them the purpose of the entire document. Or tell them the process of the entire document. Click on the "save/disk" icon to save comments.

Speech bubbles appear on the tabs to let users know there is content there. You can click on the tabs to toggle the comments below the paragraph.

By default, the comments will not be expanded below the paragraphs. Users will come to your playbook and click on tabs when they want to see the comments. You can always add an additional paragraph at the end by clicking on the "+" icon. Hovering over a paragraph places a "+" icon just above so you can always insert an additional paragraph. That's the basics of the Playbooks platform.

Some more thoughts about Playbooks.

Teams doing this for the first time should not underestimate the amount of time it will take to get everyone aligned. If you have a team of 5 lawyers, getting them all to agree on the plain meaning of legalese can be a challenge. Getting agreement on what the strategy of the wording is can be difficult. Everyone will have their own opinions about what the allowable changes are. But in the end, you will all align and have it written down. This will be invaluable for you.

Because your team is now aligned, you will all be able to give the same great service. It won't matter which team member the business turns to for help. They will get the same service.

How thorough should you be when writing down every possible scenario? Actually, your goal should be to get rid of 90% of emails. Even just this will allow you to give great service on the remaining 10%. Instead of taking two weeks to reply to emails, maybe now you can reply in two days. And then you can update comments with answers to novel questions as they come up.

Some teams have expressed concerns that telling the business about this will "create an expectation of better service." So they actually decided not to tell the business about the playbooks. At first, they wanted to use them internally to get team alignment and to make their work easier. Once they became comfortable with the playbooks, they they told the business they could use them as a convenience if they wanted to.

They didn't completely change how the business approached their team. Instead, they said "by all means keep emailing us every little thing. But if you want faster service, check the playbook to see if your question is already answered." This made it so people who were willing to change behaviors would do it first. And then they become your cheerleaders and tell everyone else about how great the tool it.

We found even though our legal team was in charge of contracts, a lot of what is in contracts is managed by other departments. Payment terms are managed by Finance. Delivery terms by Logistics. So in our guidance to change these paragraphs we said "This is a Finance term. Go to Finance for changes." This stopped so many emails from coming to the wrong people.

Or we would say "This is the default Legal language. For changes, turn to your legal counsel, but be aware that any changes will take a long time to approve." This makes it so now the business can push back in negotiations and let the other side know that changes to this will be difficult. This actually sped up contract negotiations.

Of course you can also just give allowed changes which the business can use without having to email Legal every little change. Something like the governing law. Governing law is New York by default. New Jersey and Delaware are also fine.

You might also find that some issues are very complex and really do need special attention. For these you just say "This is a very complex issue and any changes require a meeting with legal. Make an appointment with your legal counsel." So you see? We're not getting rid of all discussions. We're getting rid of the stupid little discussions and choosing where we need to spend our time.

We are appropriately empowering our end users to really own and manage the templates we provide them. We are not the babysitters who need to approve every little change, but we guide them and direct them how to work.

Another advantage with playbooks. For new people joining the team, they would ask for training in how to review contracts. Well, just read the playbook. It's all right there. We also told new people that the playbooks are not written in stone. If they see something they don't agree with or they see a way to improve, then tell the team and we can re-write them or add to them. The playbooks are living documents.

There is another huge advantage that playbooks bring beyond consistency and ease of self-service. That is in getting ready for technology like a document management system or even Artificial Intelligence. When you want to put these technologies in place, you will need to have structured data that describes all the allowed changes. By having playbooks written down you will already be ready and in a much better position to take advantage of technology.

I will package the code for the Playbooks platform and make it available.

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