Hootsuite is a pioneer in social media management and social intelligence and has been a leader in the space ever since its founding in 2008. It’s a dynamic, global, fast-moving tech company; Hootsuite’s legal department juggles multiple priorities at a fast pace with a lean commercial legal team. The 8-person group is split across North America and Europe and supports a high-volume sales organization that has “mainly peaks—there are no troughs anymore,” says Linda Evans, Senior Director, Commercial Legal & Operations at Hootsuite.
The legal team is expected to match the pace of the rest of the business, and the entire company has been asked to use AI to streamline its work. “The tech landscape is very much about innovating and being more efficient with the resources you have,” Linda says. She points out that, as a software organization, using software to meet challenges is second nature. "It's part of our DNA to use software where we can, so that we’re freeing up the lawyers’ time to do the important work."
The time was right to explore legal AI tools that could streamline their processes. The Hootsuite legal team knew that they needed a tool specifically built for their work that could meet their particular requirements. The next step was to navigate the thicket of vendors to choose the right one.
The winning factor: listening to customers
When it came time to assess vendors, Linda came to the evaluations knowing exactly what she wanted. At the time, the procurement team at Hootsuite was also under her umbrella and she had seen enough software demos to know what she needed and what she didn't.
“We did a ton of demos,” Linda recalls. "We wanted a tool for the legal team to increase turnaround time on contract reviews. We needed a vendor to meet us where we are—not selling us a one-stop solution that we were not ready to implement. Ivo was flexible."
Linda’s team agreed. "We didn't want a dramatic change to workflows,” one attorney noted. Linda backed up the point: "Ivo understood us, understood the team, understood the use case we had and wasn't trying to oversell. Ivo listened and said: We understand what you need right now. This is what we can provide. And that went a long way."
“Nothing is plug and play”
Linda notes that while the promise of AI is glittering, if you want to realize that promise, you have to do a lot of unglamorous setup work.
“Nothing is plug and play,” Linda points out. “You do not get immediate ROI out of the box.” She noted that teams have to put in the time to learn the tool, learn how to prompt it well, and to manage changing workflows before they start seeing benefits.
The turning point came when Linda reached out to Ivo's customer success team and asked for in-depth implementation training. They ran workshops that rebuilt the team's approach to using Ivo. Linda noted that during this time, Ivo's team was available, responsive, and focused on making the team successful, not just renewing the contract.
Linda says that level of support didn't go unnoticed: "That feeling of they're here to help us achieve success—that's really important when you're making the decision of which AI tool to go with.”
How the team uses Ivo now
Now that the team is more comfortable with Ivo, they use the tool across a wide range of work: reviewing contracts, generating issues lists, building negotiating strategies, and translating multilingual documents. The learning curve, the team reports, was shorter than expected, and the tool has continued to improve. Ivo Assistant, in particular, has become a standout, which the team values for the wide breadth of tasks it can perform.
"The Assistant feature is very useful," one lawyer notes. "It provides flexibility with asking Ivo several requests: explaining what a certain section requires, identifying the risk it carries, and generating redlines to mitigate that risk based on the instructions and input I provide."
For Hootsuite’s junior lawyers, Ivo has become a way to move faster on unfamiliar territory—including the rapidly evolving area of AI governance. "Ivo has been useful with explaining terminology and concepts related to AI governance and compliance," one junior lawyer observes. "It allows me to understand complex legal concepts in simpler terms."
Senior lawyers on the team are finding it strengthens their negotiating positions. "It helps validate my concerns with novel customer revisions," says one senior team member. "It allows us to have more confidence in our responses to customers."
Linda reflected back on the journey that her team took to achieve success with Ivo, and ultimately found that they ended up in a good place. "I'm so much happier at this stage of the process. You just have to get into your rhythm. And it takes a little bit of time."
