Last Updated on May 12, 2025 by Owen McGab Enaohwo
Gary Winter and Tisha English share a common interest in enhancing the operations at Lawvex, a full-service trust and estate law firm. Gary and Tisha, the Managing Attorney and Chief Operating Officer, respectively, were no strangers to implementing technology in their organization. But the basic tools they were using were inadequate for their operations.
As their business expanded, it became clear to Gary and Tisha that they needed a more solid tool to meet their growing operational needs. When they heard of SweetProcess, they were eager to try it out. The duo shared their experience of how SweetProcess helped them scale up and increase their team’s efficiency.
Gary Winter, Managing Attorney
About Lawvex
Lawvex is a full-service trust and estate law firm in California founded on the premise of making the law less frustrating for clients, lawyers, and staff. It runs a decentralized business model with a flexible work schedule for its partner attorneys so they can offer clients the best services possible.
A data-driven firm, Lawvex operates on the six core values of speed, efficiency, value, education, compassion, and transparency for a satisfying and rewarding experience. It boasts of having highly experienced lawyers on its team that work around the clock to achieve favorable results for clients.
Lawvex leverages digital tools to streamline and automate its workflow so its team members can focus on delivering the best services to its clients. It currently has about 20 employees.
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The Biggest Troubles of Inaccessibility and Inconsistency
Accessing information is an integral part of a law firm’s operations. With urgent matters and strict deadlines at hand, employees need work-related information instantly to keep the workflow running. Going through a pile of folders and Microsoft Word documents is a setback in such pressing circumstances.
Tisha English, Chief Operating Officer
“We’ve almost doubled in size in the last nine months. In the beginning, when there were just a couple of us, we would use a Word document. We had a special folder in Google Drive and stuff like that. And as we continued to grow, we realized the importance of people needing to be able to search for things when they have questions about specific things,” Tisha says.
Quality assurance was another concern at Lawvex. While the management team had faith in the ability of their employees to deliver, they wanted their performances to be consistent across the organization. Achieving this was impossible in the absence of an effective workflow tool. Employees executed tasks based on their individual knowledge and experience.
“We have people in multiple states and time zones with different backgrounds, and they’ve got experience in the legal industry. So they already have forms on their computers that they’ve done a proof of service or a form letter or a certain kind of petition. Everybody’s got their own bank of stuff that they’ve used in the past. That’s okay, but at the end of the day, we want the deliverables from our firm to have a consistent feel and look,” Gary states.
Discovering SweetProcess in the Nick of Time
As a pilot, Gary was used to working with processes. When he switched careers and became a lawyer, he was surprised to find that operations in the legal industry weren’t as process oriented.
“I saw how there was probably zero standardization, and I was at some good firms. They were very good lawyers there. This was 20 years ago. There was almost a pride in bespoke operations, like ‘We’re lawyers. This is what we do.’ I got the impression that the idea of systematizing something was distasteful to them. I just thought, ‘Well, this is stupid.’ Why are we going to do the same thing over and over again and not create a chart or process map for it?” Gary wonders.
When Gary founded his law firm, he knew from experience that his operations would be seamless if he standardized them. As the organization began to grow and work more remotely, implementing quality assurance across the teams was key, so he sought the most effective way to do it.
“We were at a point in our growth where process management became critical. Tisha and I had been diving into it thoroughly, and we saw the need. We were looking for something and we tried it, and I said, ‘Hey, I think this is helpful because it’s got the visual workflow associated with it and, you can add screenshots. You can add videos, and there’s an approval process associated with it.’ It’s been a hit for us,” Gary tells us.
How SweetProcess Raised the Bar at Lawvex
Providing employees with the resources they need to thrive at their jobs increases employee motivation. And when employees feel motivated, they go the extra mile to deliver great results. This has been the case at Lawvex with SweetProcess. Gary and Tisha tell us about the specific ways the software has improved their business.
1. Employee Onboarding and Training
Organizations often have criteria for hiring staff, and they pick the best candidates from the pool of applicants for the job. But beyond being qualified for the job, new employees need training on the specific tasks they’ll be executing for the company.
The quality of the training you provide new hires sets the tone for their performance. Gary reveals that the consistent and detailed training in SweetProcess is one of the software’s biggest impacts on his company.
“The first thing somebody will see when they join our team is that we’re going to have a thorough onboarding process. If somebody makes it through the recruitment and hiring, we are going to onboard them. This is something I think is a big weakness in our industry. I remember getting hired as an associate attorney and showing up. They gave me a desk, and said, ‘Here are your pens and pencils. Here’s your computer. Here’s how you log in, and here’s a whole stack of files. Figure it out.’ And you’ve got to just start diving in and I think that’s sort of traditional in the legal industry. There was zero onboarding. No discussion of the firm’s history,” Gary laments.
Thanks to SweetProcess, Gary’s employees don’t have to go through his experience. They have all the information they need to settle in to their roles in SweetProcess.
“What we’ve done in the last probably two years is a deep dive into how to bring people in, and SweetProcess gives us a way that we can record those videos. I’ve got a video about where we came from. This is what we’re all about. This is what we’re trying to do. This is our mission. These are our values. People can go through that and see that, and that’s part of their onboarding. It is an amazing way to incorporate people into our culture,” Gary explains.
Tisha adds that the organization can now onboard employees remotely by providing them with all the information they need in SweetProcess.
“Having processes and procedures written down in a place where everybody can find them is so important to us now, especially bringing on new people and onboarding them. I have paralegals that aren’t even in California. I have one in South Carolina, one in Alabama, and just onboarding those people and then being able to find a process for that practice area they’re coming into and being able to search for that is key.”
2. Quality Assurance
Replicating great results is one of the qualities that set successful companies apart from their counterparts. Gary ensures that his employees uphold the same high standards of delivery across his organization by following the procedures and processes documented in SweetProcess.
“There are certain ways that we do things for certain reasons because we learn certain lessons, not to do them that way. So with SweetProcess, we can be really granular about step one, step two, and step three. This is how it’s done,” Gary points out.
Employees aren’t under pressure to deliver. If they lack the skills or knowledge to be efficient, SweetProcess is a great resource for learning. They can dive into the system to empower themselves with all the information they need.
“If somebody doesn’t know how to do something, it’s a great way to learn. And even if they know how to do something, they may need to look at it because they may not know how we do it specifically, and there are reasons for it and we can put in those reasons,” he adds.
Maintaining consistency across the organization is easier with SweetProcess because, instead of working based on what they know, which is different for every person, they have a blueprint in SweetProcess they can access at all times.
3. Centralized Knowledge Base
People act to the extent of their knowledge. Employee performance in the workplace boils down to what they know. And when they have limited knowledge, it shows in their delivery.
Most employees don’t want to make preventable mistakes, so they ask their more experienced colleagues questions about how to perform their tasks. While they may have good intentions for doing so, their actions are counterproductive in terms of efficiency as the more experienced colleagues now must spend time explaining procedures and processes when they are supposed to be doing their own more productive tasks.
Tisha says that SweetProcess has been very helpful to her, as it has drastically reduced the rate at which her team members ask her endless questions about their tasks.
“We really worked this last year and a half on our processes and procedures and having them written down. It’s still a work in progress, and I think it’ll always be a work in progress. But the importance of that is that my team can go to one spot and answer their own questions without having to come to ask me. They are empowered to be able to go and seek all the information that we have written down, and they prefer that. They don’t want to come to ask me those questions,” Tisha says.
Furthermore, the employees don’t have to look all over the place for the information they need. It’s all in one place.
“Just having one centralized place that we can access all of that. Before now, it could be in this folder or that, and somebody would be like, ‘Oh well, do you know where?’” she adds.
4. Revisions and Approvals
Employees are more productive when they contribute to the processes in the workplace. They get a chance to collaborate and share their first-hand experiences on the job. SweetProcess allows authorized users to create and contribute to procedures and processes. To keep things in check, as a leader, you can vet and approve those processes before publishing them.
“One of the important aspects of having processes and updating them is that it provides investment and ownership of the process for the entire team. Not that Tisha and I are creating every single process. We’re certainly involved, but it’s better when the team creates the process, or at least has an opportunity to invest in the creation of the process, and SweetProcess has a functionality that allows other people to propose edits subject to our review and approval, and that’s a little different than most of the other solutions that I looked at,” Gary explains.
As you make changes in your business to adapt to your current needs, your team members can make helpful suggestions to your procedures and processes that are subject to your approval.
“Some of the people that are boots in the trenches there that are actually doing that work, they need to be a part of that. When stuff changes because we maybe changed a software solution or maybe a rule change occurred, they need to be able to propose an update, say, ‘Hey, this changed.’ And then it flags me. I would get an automatic email, ‘Oh, somebody proposed a change to a process.’ I could look at it quickly, approve it or Tisha could. I think that the review and version control part of the process is really important because if you just simply use a Google Doc or something that doesn’t have that functionality, you end up with people making changes without your knowledge,” Gary emphasizes.
The Next Step for Streamlining Your Operations
If Gary and Tisha could advise someone on the next step to take to streamline their operations, what would it be? Tisha advises that you take it one step at a time.
“You have to take micro steps to change your habit because it’s a habit change. You have to change from doing it your old way, whatever that looks like, to the new way and slowly enter it into SweetProcess. Once I went through the list of things in the folder, I knew what was most important… And as people were coming to me with questions, I’m like, ‘Okay, this is most important because this is obviously a question other team members probably have too.’ So, I made that next process or procedure a priority.”
Since they benefited immensely from implementing SweetProcess, you should take a cue from them and implement the software too.
Taking Your Business to Greater Heights
Getting your business from where it is now to where you want it to be is totally in your hands. Gary and Tisha recognized the need to streamline their operations when their business began to expand, and they implemented SweetProcess to manage that growth. Today, they are happy they made that decision.
Do you want to take your business to the next level? Sign up for a 14-day free trial of SweetProcess. You don’t need a credit card for the trial. If you aren’t impressed by the end of your trial, you can simply walk away.