Radiant Law is an innovative international firm specializing in contracts for large and fast-growing companies with a very fast turnaround. They credit their processes and documentation, and their focus on continuous improvement, for delivering contracts quickly and reliably.

When Alex Hamilton, the firm's CEO, started Radiant, he envisioned a better way to serve customers in the legal industry by charging a fixed price for contracts rather than by the hour, which is how traditional law firms work. This involved taking a risk and streamlining processes in order to make the firm profitable. The only way to do so was to document and share knowledge so that processes could be repeated and iterated faster by individuals in the firm. Their decision, risk, and dedication to knowledge sharing and processes paid off: Whereas the average in-house legal team takes thirty days to create or turn a contract, Radiant delivers 90% in half a day.

"It was a deliberate design decision to sell output instead of hours because of our dedication to process and constant iteration," Alex says. "We want to build a more collaborative, sharing organization that allows the team to focus on helping our clients create great relationships and keep improving what we do. We see collaboration tools and automation as a key part of this."

A huge part of Radiant's ability to move quickly: Its writing culture

From its inception, Radiant Law has strongly emphasized being a written culture, trying to write down everything people need to know. "A written culture helps us make knowledge actionable and available just when you need it, helping us be more reliable as well as making it easier to improve," says Alex. This culture helps them share what they've learned in one part of the organization with everyone else.

But a writing culture goes beyond simply writing things down. According to Alex, "Wikis are a core tool in unlocking knowledge, but I believe they are even more powerful when used within a collaboration-focused environment. I've been using wikis since I introduced one at my previous firm in 2003 - I can't find an earlier instance of a wiki in a law firm! - and they change the dynamic about how we think as a team about knowledge." His goal in creating written documentation through wikis was to say something once, let everyone access it, and ensure it's updated when it changes. "Written knowledge lets us move faster and improve constantly," he says. Given the nature of legal work—people do much of their work on their own—sharing knowledge is critical. It's even more important because of Radiant's distributed and virtual team, which is based in South Africa and Trinidad, making it even more important to reduce friction in collaboration.

Removing friction around documentation and collaboration with Slab

As Radiant grew, the team realized that their written knowledge wasn't being updated enough. There was simply too much friction in documenting and updating information in their previous tool. So they went to look for a solution that removed that friction to documenting knowledge.

"We realized the ease of editing was fundamental to whether things were being kept up to date."

In a new solution, Alex and the team hoped to find a tool that would be functional, making it easier to write, edit, and publish. They wanted a tool that was easy to use and modern to reduce friction and keep knowledge updated. "We realized the ease of editing was fundamental to whether things were being kept up to date," Alex says. They wanted something that would encourage team buy-in and connect easily with other tools through an API.

The team chose Slab because it met all of Radiant's criteria and was a single-solution tool, not trying to be all-in-one. They liked that Slab considers both the writing experience and the reading experience because it normalizes just reading a post while also lowering friction for writing and editing.

And moving content over to Slab from their existing wiki was easy once they decided to make the shift. "The formatting in Slab is so simple and straightforward, we could just copy and paste from our existing wiki, and everything looked as it should," Alex says.

Knowledge sharing is critical to scaling

By removing the friction they faced around documentation and knowledge sharing—critical practices for the firm's growth, efficiency, and continued expansion—Radiant Law has been able to align its team as its business scaled. The team has grown and expanded to more countries, supported by the faster knowledge sharing that was unlocked by Slab.

Slab is critical for knowledge sharing and collaboration at Radiant, sometimes to the surprise of new hires. "When lawyers join us, they find it startling that everything is in Slab," says Alex. "They're used to people squirreling their knowledge away, but at Radiant, we share knowledge rather than hoarding it." Using Slab democratizes information and makes context accessible to everyone, which helps them contract faster.

Maintaining Radiant Law's edge with well-documented processes

Slab acts as a repository of context around Radiant's many processes, which they track step-by-step in Airtable. "We can't house context in Airtable, which acts as the tightest, most collapsed version of a process," explains Alex. "Slab holds information surrounding those processes and acts as a place to teach and educate our team about them, which further enhances our ability to scale rapidly."

Finding a balance between a highly structured space—Airtable—and a more freeform space—Slab—has been critical to sharing processes and information across the firm. These processes, which are core to how Radiant operates, differentiate them from a traditional law firm where clients are billed by the hour. "Our structure incentivizes us to simplify and streamline, so documenting processes is critical."

Slab's simplicity—its singular focus on knowledge sharing—makes the editing process effortless for team members and helps them focus on the content. "The fact that people can't really configure how it looks puts the focus on the substance," says Alex.

Putting a written culture into practice to become more efficient

As Radiant continues to scale, they'll use Slab to put their written culture into practice and encourage their team to share knowledge internally. By documenting processes and knowledge and collaborating through tools like Slab, their outputs will become more and more efficient—letting them focus on adding even more value for their clients.

This unique adoption of technology to drive efficiency is fundamentally aligned with Radiant's commitment to constantly evolving and growing—and sets them apart from other firms.

"I imagine how we'll be using Slab a year from now will be completely different from today because we are evolving as a firm," says Alex. "Slab's API functionality will support our growth and adoption of other tools, all while acting as a central place to store knowledge that is core to our firm."