Service of process (SOP) is something that should always be evolving and changing within your organization, which is why it is important for you to periodically evaluate your processes. As your organization grows, so does the complexity of your service of process.
The SOP complexity continuum
This growing complexity is why it’s important to understand the current and future SOP needs of your organization and scale your tools and processes to match. This is where the complexity continuum comes into play. Depending on where you are in the SOP life cycle, your organization will have different needs and your service of process tool should reflect that.
After automation, it becomes easier to see where there’s opportunity for more. With all SOP in a central repository, tracking documents and oversight at the summary level is next. This allows you to see that everything is being taken care of and where you might have potential risk, so that you can address it before it becomes a problem. Lastly, with common consistent data capture, you should be able to do some basic reporting.
In this phase, your service of process tool should provide:
- All the features from Phase 1, plus:
- Detailed automated routing
- Tracking and oversight
- Searching
- Basic reporting
Phase 3: Getting up to speed with SOP
As your organization continues to ramp up in complexity, many solutions will also give you the ability to capture custom data.
By going beyond just what your registered agent captures during intake and adding some other coding or categorization to your process, you can make it easier to route, report, and search. Layering in a custom set of data collection can be very powerful for your organization. As you continue to evolve, you’ve got more information at your disposal and have the opportunity to look at more complex set of reports.
In this phase, your service of process tool should provide:
- All the features from Phases 1 and 2, plus:
- Custom data collection
- Document uploading
- Complex reporting
Phase 4: Turning your SOP into a finely tuned engine
In the most complex environments and organizations, SOP hums along as a finely tuned engine. It has to. At this stage, people look to move beyond just a mere acknowledgement process. They want to assign specific tasks and track activity around each of those tasks, for each document or each matter, by layering in collaboration.
This requires being able to share the content that’s in your repository with people outside your corporate legal department quickly, easily, and securely. Additionally, you need to be able to access all of this information and share with downstream systems.
In this phase, your service of process tool should provide:
- All the
features from Phases 1, 2, and 3, plus:- Tasks
- Collaboration
- Integration
with other company systems
There are plenty of organizations doing all of these things, but there are also plenty that will never need the full range of SOP services represented here. We recommend you evaluate where you’re company currently is on this continuum, as well as where you ultimately want to be. From there, you can determine next steps to get where you need to be.
If you want to take your SOP to the next level, CSC can help. We understand how critical it is to get these documents to the intended target quickly and accurately, as well as to deliver consistently over time. Learn more about all of our Registered Agent services here.
Want to learn more about SOP or registered agents in general? View our recorded webinar “Service of Process Health Check: 7 Key Questions”. See all of our upcoming webinars here.
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