Helping TikTok's legal team scale with the business
Learn how Simul helps TikTok's Content & Partnerships Legal Team handle an increasing amount of matters as the business rapidly grows
An ad-hoc approach to matters
As TikTok grew in both popularity and employee count, the Content & Marketing Legal team received increasing numbers of requests to negotiate contracts with celebrities, influencers, media companies, etc.
The biggest problem was that each time a request came in they were being dealt with in an ad-hoc manner, with contracts being written from scratch or modified from a previous contract for each individual manner.
“A big part of promoting TikTok and getting more content onto the platform is having celebrities, influencers and brands do livestreams of events and performances on the platform,”’ says Colin Malarchuk, Legal Operations Specialist at TikTok. “The contracts for negotiating these deals are all really similar, but we were basically rewriting them from scratch each time by taking a general service agreement and modifying it.”
The Content & Partnerships legal team knew that if they were going to scale with the business they needed to streamline the process of creating and executing certain deals, so they embarked on a project to create a repository of contract templates for many of the regularly requested deals.
Helping rapidly build a template repository
The team knew that if they were going to draft, collaborate on, and finalise hundreds of legal contract templates in a short period of time they needed a better way to manage it than emailing documents around with crazy filenames like ‘Livestream Contract Template_V7_ROSS_EDITS’, so they turned to Simul.
When a new contract needs to be created, Colin will assign it to one of the lawyers who will write an initial draft. That initial draft will be uploaded to Simul and automatically assigned Version 0.0.1.
They’ll then invite other team members to collaborate on the document. Each time another team member makes a change, Simul automatically creates a new version (I.e. 0.0.2) and shows what was changed in that version, even if Track Changes wasn’t turned on.
The team will go back-and-forth making changes until everyone is happy with the template, at which point it will be published (changing the version number to 1.0.0), downloaded from Simul and placed into their document management tool for wider business users to access.
When a template needs updating, the team simply goes back into the document in Simul, makes changes, publishes a new version (I.e. 2.0.0) and then uploads the newly updated version to the document management tool.
“The thing we love about Simul is it keeps everything in one place,” says Colin. “Each time someone makes an edit, a new version is created and Simul shows what changed, plus we can add comments that that summarise why we made the changes as well. So in one spot we can see the full history of a document, including what changed, who changed it, when it changed and why it changed.”
A streamlined workflow for handling matters
By creating a library of contract templates that both the business users and legal team can draw from, the Content & Marketing Legal team has been able to significantly reduce the turnaround time of matters, which ultimately results in more partnerships and promotions being done to drive growth for TikTok.
“Getting to a point where we have baseline contract templates for nearly every use case has been a huge undertaking for our team, and Simul has been an essential part of getting us to this point” says Colin.
“The thing we love about Simul is it keeps everything in one place. Each time someone makes an edit, a new version is created and Simul shows what changed, plus we can add comments that summarise why we made the changes as well. So in one spot we can see the full history of a document, including what changed, who changed it, when it changed and why it changed ”
Colin Malarchuk - Legal Operations Specialist
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