Hitachi Digital

Hitachi Digital's legal and compliance teams managed requests across multiple disconnected shared and distributed inboxes spanning subsidiaries, leaving attorneys reactive with no visibility into incoming, stuck, or dropped work. As the company shifted from a subsidiary-driven model to a unified legal shared-service center, it lacked any system to track the volume or type of work, making it impossible to plan capacity or prove legal's value to the business. Hundreds of sales contract templates also sat scattered across SharePoint folders organized by country, so sales teams regularly grabbed the wrong or outdated template or emailed legal directly.

Hitachi Digital adopted Checkbox, a no-code legal workflow platform, to build a branded Legal Front Door called Hikari (Japanese for "light"). The team partnered with implementation partner Harbor Global to co-develop its first three workflows through a "Learn-As-You-Build" program, then continued building entirely in-house without IT involvement. The platform combined AI chatbot-style intake guidance, smart triage and auto-approval rules for low-risk requests, intelligent contract document generation, and real-time dashboards.

Within 90 days, Hitachi Digital deployed 11 workflows against an initial goal of 3, covering intake, contract review, signature delegation, and document generation. The annual Conflict of Interest disclosure process — previously impossible to complete manually within its 2-month compliance window — launched successfully: within 2 days, 200 of 700 disclosures were submitted, with 88.9% auto-approved by configured rules and only a small share requiring manual review. Legal now owns and manages the entire system without IT support, and other departments have begun requesting their own Checkbox-based workflows.

• Auto-approval rules can make previously unstaffable compliance obligations (e.g., reviewing hundreds of disclosures in a fixed window) achievable without added headcount.
• A structured "Learn-As-You-Build" onboarding with an implementation partner accelerated adoption well past the original 3-workflow scope.
• Centralizing intake into one branded front door replaced scattered inboxes and template sprawl with visibility legal could use to demonstrate its value.