How the JetBrains Legal team supports 20+ products globally with YouTrack
| Industry | Software development |
|---|---|
| Location | Global |
| Company size | 1000+ |
| Team function | Legal |
| Team size | 25-50 |
The challenge
The JetBrains Legal team is essential for ensuring the legal integrity of the company’s 20+ software development tools trusted by more than 11 million professionals worldwide. The team’s tasks vary greatly, from common requests to complex legal work on new product launches. Constantly challenging themselves with new projects, the team customizes YouTrack to streamline their diverse work across 13+ jurisdictions.
The solution
The team has been using YouTrack for many years. During this time, the Legal department grew from a few lawyers to a large and experienced team. YouTrack is a flexible project and task management solution that can scale with their growing legal needs.
Now, YouTrack helps connect 30+ lawyers with 2,000+ JetBrains employees in one place. Any JetBrains team member can submit a new request to the Legal team in YouTrack, and the Legal team decides how the process for handling it is structured. The requests can be submittted as one of 18 predefined types. Some operational routines, like assigning tasks to the right person, were delegated to YouTrack automations, saving time for each lawyer. There’s also an internal JetBrains Slack channel for small legal queries and questions about the best way to submit a legal request.
To work effectively and help with frequently asked questions, the Legal team created an internal Knowledge Base with document templates and FAQ answers that are accessible to everyone in the company. With descriptions of the team’s work processes, the Knowledge Base is also used to onboard new lawyers.
Jan Ondrus
Senior Legal Counsel, JetBrains
"Our Legal team receives over 1,600 legal support requests annually. We rely on YouTrack daily to organize and track each request as an individual legal project, document stakeholder information, share our legal solutions, and record internal approvals when necessary."
Jelizaveta Jurickova
Junior Legal Counsel, JetBrains
"With YouTrack, my onboarding was so fast and easy. It helps to educate our new legal employees."
Easily navigate requests, regardless of jurisdiction
YouTrack provides two main approaches to managing requests – receive everything in a single project or separate projects, for example, split by jurisdiction. The JetBrains Legal team found that a centralized entry point for every request type across all offices streamlined their processes and helped eliminate potential errors caused by moving incorrectly submitted tasks from one office-related project to another. Another benefit of this approach is that all data is stored in one place and can be accessed with ease.
Organize audit trails in YouTrack
The team’s favorite YouTrack functionality is the ability to access projects’ data history. This helps organize an audit trail of any resolved or ongoing requests. For example, complex requests related to new product launches can be processed faster when related tasks can be easily referenced. When the team launched JetBrains AI, they searched for similar solved cases using a project filter and the AI-legal tag.
In addition, having all the relevant information summarized inside ongoing tasks simplifies the team’s work and boosts their productivity. Instead of looking into various emails, team members can view relevant request information from a single YouTrack task that provides details such as due dates, attachments, updates from stakeholders, and more.
"YouTrack helps us organize audit trails. The ability to access the history of any request resolution mitigates potential unknown risks."
Vladimír Krasula
Head of General Legal, JetBrains
Automate request distribution rules
Every type of legal request needs a unique task template based on the team’s approach to resolving it. With YouTrack, the team automated the process, so the task is customized on the fly without additional manual input required. Once the requestor selects the legal type, the task is updated with a field template and specific guidance for how to compose the description for this request type. YouTrack also adds pre-populated fields based on the requestor’s initial inputs. For example, YouTrack automatically assigns the task and notifies relevant stakeholders based on the jurisdiction identified in the request.
"By defining the decision tree for each request type, we save a lot of time. We also employ customized automations that help set up various distribution rules and re-configure the default system faster, automatically updating requests in real time."
Vladimír Krasula
Head of General Legal, JetBrains
Keep sensitive project and task information private
Automations via YouTrack workflows were also applied to legal requests that need to be managed privately. Once a private request is created, YouTrack immediately restricts the task’s visibility to a selected, predefined group of people. For example, HR legal requests are visible only to the Legal team, the requestor, and the jurisdiction country’s HR managers.
Another privacy feature the team uses is the ability to restrict select task information. For example, the Finance controlling review state field can be modified only by a Finance controlling reviewer assignee. This functionality also helps requestors better understand what information is required from them, preventing potential mistakes.
"YouTrack differs from other tools for lawyers, as it gives the ability to easily restrict various aspects of a specific project. You can make the project visible to your lawyers only, and access to some tasks or fields can be restricted to a few relevant stakeholders."
Kristyna Tranova
Legal Counsel, JetBrains
Track ongoing progress and historical data
The team decided to unify the state field for each legal task – from Submitted to Solved. This approach improved the analysis of multiple requests simultaneously.
Some of the team’s lawyers configure personal Agile Boards by task state. This means all requests are grouped in columns by their resolution status, and the lawyers can easily navigate to all requests within the same state. It’s possible to customize this type of board further, for example by dividing requests into horizontal swimlane groups by Due date or Legal type as shown in the second image below.
Dashboards and reports are used for all team needs and are especially insightful for managers. For example, the Legal team has shared dashboards with automatically updated widgets that display lists of tasks assigned to each team member, diagrams that help analyze the number of requests each lawyer has assigned to them, and more.
Reports are mostly used to work with historical data and can also be added to Dashboards. For example, the team uses them to track how many requests were resolved, split by request type or jurisdiction. Additionally, managers can compare current reports with previous ones to analyze the team’s performance over time.
Connect all involved team members in one place
Another benefit of YouTrack that the JetBrains Legal team loves is the ability to streamline communication with all employees in task comments. If there’s any change within a submitted request, the requestor can add a new comment to simultaneously notify all stakeholders or address specific users with a private comment. It’s easy for the lawyers to work with email notifications and come back to YouTrack when they are tagged.
"Because all team members are connected in one tool, our communication is greatly improved."
Kristyna Tranova
Legal Counsel, JetBrains
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