Inspire 2021 recently featured five customer and eight partner awards — and our inaugural NetDocuments Hackathon. These programs recognize inspired work and celebrate those who inspire. Congratulations to all our winners!

Customer Awards

Because of our joint success, we felt it was appropriate to expand this year’s Customer Awards beyond the annual Customer Zero award. Each of this year’s winners have done tremendous work with NetDocuments. Each of this year’s winners have continued to innovate around the NetDocuments Service, thus furthering the extensibility of the platform to address multiple workflows across business units.

• Security Champion: Sullivan and Cromwell was honored for their innovative application of NetDocuments security features and options in their unique environment.
• Adoption Hero: Kean Miller received the Adoption Hero award because they had incredible utilization right out the gates. Their efforts shine as an example of how to seamlessly incorporate new technology into users’ daily workflows, while allowing them the comfort of working in a familiar environment.
• Top Integration: DuPont was recognized with the Top Integration award for their work with strategic partner Kroll to add significant value and functionality to their implementation by effectively utilizing the open NetDocuments platform to promote user self-service and fully engaging our APIs.
• Business Expansion: Corteva received the Customer Award for Business Expansion. While they started in Legal and R&D, the team advertises and showcases the many facets of the platform to let other business units know how they can leverage NetDocuments.
• Customer Zero: Husch Blackwell was named our Customer Zero award winner! This annual award is about innovation, consistency, and resiliency, and is given to the customer that expands, and sometimes overturns, our product expectations.

“Inspire 2021 has been our biggest conference to date and is all about celebrating our customers’ successes. Our customers are innovating at a record pace, and we are very pleased to honor this year’s inspiring award winners.”

Bobby Tindel, Senior Vice President of Customer Success

Partner Awards

Partners have a tremendous impact on how we can serve customers and what we are able to accomplish each and every day. These awards recognize those who have done truly remarkable things throughout the year.

“It’s hard to award only eight partners this year because we have seen so many great successes across markets. This year’s winners have had record-breaking results and have gone above and beyond to grow the NetDocuments ecosystem.”

Reza Parsia, Vice President, Strategic Partner Management

The NetDocuments Hackathon

Many hackathon events span two to three days where a problem is presented and teams create solutions within that short time frame. In our inaugural Hackathon, we wanted to take a different approach.

The Rules

We allowed teams from our customers and partners comprised of three to four people each to determine which problem they wanted to solve, ensuring enough time to think through a viable solution. The problem had to be solved by using the combined power of NetDocuments and Microsoft Power Automate. Teams had six weeks to submit:

• A write-up about their solution
• A video of their solution in action
• The exported Power Automate workflow

The Results

Twenty-three teams from four countries put their hats in the ring! A total of 82 customers and partners were determined to innovate. Teams worked on their solutions, and we received 14 completed submissions. From there, five teams became our finalists. Here are the results!

Team Affinity Consulting (Russell Duncan, Chris Martz, Michelle Willette, and Megan Clements) developed a solution to create flexible retention policies using Power Automate and saved searches within NetDocuments.

• Team Kroll (Brian Joyce, Jay Glover, and Jairo Gaviria) finished in second place. They submitted a solution to simplify workspace creation in NetDocuments by providing a form with validated fields tied to the repository.
• Team Verlata (Steve Pickering, Robyna May, Nic Mulrine, and Susan Bryant) submitted a solution that provides a more effective way to submit, review, and manage a precedent library.
• Team Kutak Rock for their work embedding a docketing calendar within a matter workspace and changing matter access with an approval workflow.
• Team Element Technologies for their work embedding a docketing calendar within a matter workspace and changing matter access with an approval workflow.

All submitted solutions demonstrate how NetDocuments and the Microsoft Power Automate no-code workflow ecosystem can work seamlessly, together, to solve a wide variety of real-world problems.

The NetDocuments Hackathon contributed $15K to charities in the U.S. and Australia on behalf of the top five winning teams.

“We are thrilled to show off the power of the NetDocuments platform in combination with Microsoft Power Automate and showcase solutions conceived and engineered by our very own customers and strategic business partners. Beyond recognizing the winners, we’d like to thank all teams that submitted their own solution.”

Mike Sanders, Senior Solutions Expert and originator of the NetDocuments Hackathon

What is Inspire?

In 2020, we launched Work Inspired to describe the “why” behind NetDocuments – and illustrate how we’re helping teams work inspired with greater productivity, collaboration, and security. Along with that, we revamped our ndElevate conference to become the Inspire event, where we capture the power of Work Inspired with intentional innovation – innovation that’s inspired by legal teams around the world.

This year’s Inspire event was hosted virtually November 2-4 and included customer and partner successes, interactive product sessions, office hours with subject-matter experts, and insightful keynotes.

Continued Inspiration

As we continue our journey to help legal professionals do their best work, we are always looking for new technologies and solutions that will accelerate this path forward. We look forward to seeing what our customers and partners come up with next!