Hypertherm Turns a Legal “Black Box” into a Playbook-Driven Operating System

The Challenge: Three Core Constraints

Before Sandstone, Hypertherm’s legal operations were hampered by three primary issues:

1. Inefficient Intake: Routine questions and high-volume agreements flooded the legal inbox. This "noise" drained focus and made it impossible for leadership to measure actual output or team capacity.
2. Fragmented Context: For complex, "heavy-lift" contracts, gathering historical business context and previous deal data could take days, slowing down the speed of business.
3. Static Institutional Knowledge: Negotiation guidance and precedents lived in individual memories or buried in old email threads. There was no structured system to ensure this expertise was applied consistently across the team.

The Solution: Why Sandstone?

Hypertherm needed a system to capture context upfront and convert repetitive negotiations into reusable legal playbooks. Sandstone was selected for three key capabilities:

• Centralized, Zero-Friction Intake: Sandstone routes requests from over 30 existing tools (including Slack, Salesforce, and email) without requiring users to fill out tedious forms. This turned the inbox from a chaotic "system of record" into a structured, automated queue.
• Dynamic, Integrated Playbooks: Instead of storing guidance in a static PDF, Sandstone embeds playbooks directly into the workflow. The system learns from every interaction, operationalizing institutional knowledge so that every team member negotiates with the same level of expertise.
• Real-Time Workload Intelligence: Sandstone replaces the "black box" with a transparent dashboard. It surfaces critical business context, such as urgency, strategic value, and historical precedent, allowing legal leadership to manage the department with data-backed visibility.

The Results

• Eliminated Intake "Noise": Automated the tracking of routine requests, freeing the legal team to focus on high-leverage strategic work.
• Full Workload Visibility: Provided leadership with real-time insights into department output, replacing guesswork with measurable data.
• Codified Expertise: Established structured negotiation playbooks that improved consistency, speed, and risk alignment across all global matters.
• Accelerated Contracting: Captured structured context at the start of the process, significantly reducing the turnaround time for complex commercial agreements.

“For the first time, I have real-time insights into our entire workload—context and data I simply never had access to before. We aren't just working faster; we’re finally able to manage our department with the strategic precision the business expects.”