Esports giant Fnatic reduced risk and boosted happiness with Josef

Global esports performance brand, Fnatic, has maximised staff and client happiness, increased productivity, and mitigated risk with Josef bots and document automation. 

Esports is competitive, professional video gaming – a market that generates more than $1 billion USD in revenue. Fnatic is a leading company within the lucrative esports industry.  Uniquely among esports teams, it manufactures its own performance gaming hardware, including mice, keyboards, pads and headsets.  

Last year, Fnatic ranked among the most watched teams in esports, generating  an international audience of more than 120 million watched hours across western streaming platforms.

Fnatic is a global operation, with a presence across 17 time zones.  Its inhouse team of two are required to manage risk and scan the horizon to spot any upcoming icebergs, carefully steering the professional gaming company away from them.

Fnatic’s legal team wanted to be able to focus on longer term strategies for the company, instead of getting bogged down by deliverables and documents. It also wanted to streamline its legal documents, removing draconian and tedious signing off processes to boost productivity and reduce errors.

Andy Cooke, General Counsel at Fnatic, also noticed that young people – including Fnatic’s staff and their core clients – expected the same level of service from lawyers that they normally get in their private lives with apps like Uber, Deliveroo, Netflix, and YouTube.

Fnatic identified that its over 100 staff needed to be able to “self-service” when it came to collecting information and automating documents. 

Andy cites research showing that 83% of customers expect to engage with someone immediately when contacting a company. Anything other than an instant response is too slow.  This expectation is referred to as the trend of the  “narcissist consumer”. 

“That sounds judgmental – it’s not! Basically, there’s a lot of apps and services now that exist to make you feel very special and very individual.  You get what you want, when and where you want it, and without having to speak to a person.  And that’s a trend we have to be aware of and respond to so that our service delivery remains relevant.”

Staff at Fnatic currently use 15 bots to auto-generate agreements, including employment agreements, contracts with professional players and coaches, release agreements, and manufacturing agreements. 

Josef acts as the front end of Fnatic’s service, as a self-service portal driven by bots. Users can create documents with clicks and natural text inputs, wherever and whenever, and the user experience and functionality is the same on desktop and mobile.

“Josef’s good for us because it’s a no code platform, we’re able to do these iterations and constantly be improving things and adding extra things. We don’t have a dedicated IT team that we can go to and get them to code new features,” says George Fellows, Legal Associate at Fnatic.

“It was important for us as a team to be able to do it ourselves.”

Fnatic is working on several other Josef bots that are bubbling away. They’re building a whistleblowing bot to protect themselves against risk by allowing people to report to them anonymously. 

“A lot of people who want to report concerns may not feel comfortable revealing their identity,” says George. “It’s not just about document automation…but bigger picture things that we can be working on as well.”

The other bot they’re looking to build using Josef concerns safeguarding minors and their interactions with adults in the esports world, which may function similarly to the whistleblowing bot.

Fnatic also have extensive merch and fan apparel, and are looking to apply a Josef bot to the returns processes for wholesale products. 

Since it’s a large, global market, they want to create a returns bot in multiple languages, which Josef supports.

“If lots of customers are bringing back a keyboard because they’re experiencing defects, obviously, we want to know about that,” Andy says.

“I’m pleased to say that hasn’t happened so far, but what we want to do is make it as easy as possible for that issue to be escalated to the people who build the products here at Fnatic.”

“We can make it as easy as possible for people to create reports in their own language. That will make it easy for us to track and respond to issues and, hopefully, minimise any impact on our brand”

Fnatic has also integrated Josef with Tabled’s CS ticketing system, to enhance workflow visibility in a way that works for their team.

Goodbye to the mindless sign-off processes

Josef’s automation allows Fnatic to cull unnecessary interactions in the multi-staged approval process, George says.

Instead of doing things the traditional way, where a document goes back and forth between a client and lawyer, Josef removes the need for the lawyer to be involved until after the documents are created, saving precious time.  This approach also enhances accountability – the procuring client, who will ultimately manage the contract, is involved directly in its creation.

Lawyers can focus on bigger things

Fnatic’s legal team can proactively focus on risk mitigation and work on projects outside of deliverables.

When you’re buried in creating contracts, Andy says, “you have no chance of focusing on long term projects which create value.” 

Andy says Josef has helped Fnatic adapt by shifting the focus from daily deliverables to being future-ready.

Scaling up to infinity and beyond 

As a fast-growing company that “wakes up in Australia and goes to bed in the States”, and with active offices in London, Berlin, Taiwan, Belgrade, Kuala-Lumpur and Mumbai, Andy says Josef allows them to “scale infinitely”. Instantaneous and accessible automation is pivotal to seamlessly supporting Fnatic’s accelerated growth.

“[Josef] meets the need for this very personalised, immediate [use], from a phone, from a laptop, wherever the user is based  in the Fnatic world,” Andy says.

Everyone’s happier

Staff at Fnatic were surveyed about the delivery of legal services with Josef’s automation solutions, and 100% said they strongly agree or agree that the in-house team delivers outstanding work.

Taking away repetitive, easily automated work also made the lawyers happier. 

Over the course of 2020, the legal team has been the happiest of all departments at Fnatic, which has translated to value in multiple ways, like creating an internal podcast, and focusing on charity initiatives (with Fnatic generating $475,000 in donations for UNICEF in 2020).