From manual contracts to scalable legal ops: How BHI uses Docusign IAM to give legal time back and keep contracts moving

Abby Zach joined BHI opens in a new tab as a Legal Operations Assistant with a computer science background and a love of solving technical challenges. Those skills came in handy soon after she started. BHI’s legal team was ready to replace a legacy contract management system that kept slowing down its work, and Zach was tasked with leading the setup of its replacement, Docusign Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM).

“I love to be creative and try new things,” says Zach. “I quickly saw how moving to Docusign IAM was a big step up from our last contract management system.”

That system now sits at the center of BHI’s fast-moving business. The company is a national general contractor that takes complex building, energy, infrastructure, and mining projects from groundbreaking to ribbon cutting, and every one of those projects runs on contracts. Prime contracts set the terms with clients. Subcontracts, master service agreements (MSAs), and NDAs bring in the partners who help do the work. Anywhere from 60 to 100 contracts reach the legal team each week, reviewed by one of the three legal ops assistants or three attorneys. Each one needs to move quickly and accurately to keep projects on track while managing risk.

Leaving a broken process behind for one connected platform

When Zach first joined BHI, she quickly learned why the legal team was struggling with the legacy contract management system. The platform was slow and crashed often. Templates sometimes failed to pull in intake data, and counterparty redlines force the team to undo a signature request and start over. 

“There were a lot of manual steps that users dealt with every day,” says Zach. “If you stepped into the middle of a contract, you would have no idea what’s going on.”

That lack of visibility is a common legal ops problem: if status lives across inboxes, handoffs, and disconnected tools, legal has to spend extra time reconstructing what happened, what version is current, and what needs action next.

BHI evaluated a long list of vendors before selecting Docusign IAM.

 Faster reviews and clearer visibility with Docusign IAM

Zach became the person who led the move to Docusign IAM. She migrated more than 2,000 legacy documents and rebuilt the legal team’s processes request by request, with a Docusign onboarding consultant meeting with her several times a week.

Zach has since built about 80 workflows and more than 30 request types, and she continues to add three to four new templates or requests every month. Employees now submit contract requests through one intake process designed by Zach that gives legal a clearer front door for requests and reduces off-process handoffs. Subcontracts, MSAs, and NDAs route to legal and risk management at the same time so reviews happen in parallel, shortening turnaround time. When counterparties send redlines, the team adds them as a new version instead of starting a new signature request process from scratch.

This is where the operational payoff becomes clear for in-house legal teams:

• Structured intake replaces ad hoc requests

• Parallel routing reduces avoidable waiting time

• Version control prevents restart-heavy redline cycles

• A single source of truth improves status visibility across legal, risk, and the business

The legal team managed more than 600 contract requests in its first six months after fully moving over to Docusign IAM. Processing a single request once took at least an hour in the legacy system. Now automated workflows carry most of that work. 

Visibility has improved too. Docusign tracks where a contract is and how long it spends in each stage. If a contract gets stuck in customer review for two weeks, the requester knows that they need to follow up to keep agreements and the projects they outline moving.

For lean legal and legal ops teams, the biggest win is often not one dramatic feature. It is getting control over the basics:

• One intake path instead of requests coming through email and side channels

• Routing that gets the right reviewers working in parallel

• Workflow visibility so legal is not a black box to the business

• Less admin work and more time for substantive review, exception handling, and negotiation

Giving legal three hours back every day with custom agents

Once BHI had a stronger contract workflow foundation in place, Zach focused on the next layer of efficiency to remove the repetitive coordination work that still consumed the legal team’s day. When BHI joined the Docusign Agents Early Access Program, she took the lead with Docusign Agent Studio, where people can launch ready-to-deploy AI agents or build their own custom ones. Even with no formal AI training, Zach dove headfirst into custom agent creation and quickly learned how easy it was to build an agent for their unique business needs. BHI now runs eight custom agents, and the results show up across the business:

• Faster repeat requests: For contracts involving the same counterparty or project as an earlier request, agents can copy details from a previous request into a new one, allowing submitters to spend less time entering the same information on multiple requests.

• Visibility and balanced workloads: An agent shows each legal assistant’s open requests in one view, so managers can assign new work without digging through the request dashboard.

• One-click counterparty sends: An agent adds the recipients, standard language, and every supporting document automatically, saving assistants from copying messages and attaching files by hand.

• Instant approval updates: An agent notifies submitters when risk management approves a subcontractor, pulling details from the request so risk management doesn’t have to write each message. 

Together, the agents save each legal assistant an estimated three hours a day, adding up to 2,000 hours annually. By freeing up so much time, the small team can handle more work and better keep pace with BHI’s business.

The agents run inside Docusign IAM, where BHI’s contract requests, project details, and documents already live. That lets them act directly on BHI’s agreement process and feed their output into the workflows Zach built. 

“We use AI as a starting point,” says Zach. “Then we can review the output and verify accuracy.” For example, duplication agents fill in a new request automatically, and submitters review and edit the details before moving forward. 

The team adopted the agents quickly. “Docusign Agent Studio has been tremendously helpful,” says Zach. “We’ve been using these custom agents for about a month and we can’t even remember how we got things done manually before.” 

Supporting BHI’s commitment to the highest level of service

Zach has become BHI’s go-to Docusign resource. She’s working closely with BHI’s developers and Docusign to connect IAM. She’s also helping coworkers become more self-sufficient by showing them how to ask AI to find contracts. For legal ops teams, this reinforces that workflow ownership does not have to sit entirely with IT. A lean legal team can build and refine processes over time when the system is manageable.

BHI’s mission is to offer customers outstanding services, and Zach sees its agreement process as part of that promise.