Globally recognized golf manufacturer TaylorMade revolutionizes legal processes with Microsoft Syntex

Driving for continued business excellence

Founded in 1979 with the pledge to combine innovation with authenticity, TaylorMade Golf has a decades-long reputation as the best performing golf brand in the world.

Since the creation of the first metalwood in 1979, the company has established itself as more than just a cutting-edge sports gear manufacturer. With the motto “Never done” at its core, TaylorMade has a culture where innovation and improvement aren’t just encouraged but nurtured. This drive for excellence spans its departments, from processes to products and athletes, pushing the company’s people to take risks, explore new frontiers, and find new pathways for improvement.

Discovering opportunities for further innovation

Constantly striving to work smarter and drive efficiency across its business, TaylorMade’s IT team has invested heavily in exploring and adopting the latest technology solutions. To hold to its tradition as the best-performing golf brand, these new solutions need to be secure, compliant, globally accessible, and best in class. To put it simply, the solutions the company uses must exemplify the qualities that the brand holds dearest. “We’re looking for solutions that perform better than what anyone else does and have the best team behind them,” says Ali Chitsaz, Senior Manager of Digital Workplace at TaylorMade Golf.

One area that the team recognized needed improvement was content management—particularly around patent and trademark information. To be able to manage a plethora of legal documents and sensitive information, TaylorMade’s legal team traditionally spent endless hours manually managing content as it arrived in Outlook. When they received trademark or patent information in their inboxes, legal team members would move the individual documents to their hierarchical system of Outlook folders. This tedious process was inefficient and prone to human error, pushing the company away from its innovation mission.

Throughout the years, TaylorMade has been an early adopter of Microsoft solutions, including Microsoft Teams and other collaboration tools. With its trust set firmly in Microsoft solutions, TaylorMade’s IT team looked to it for a new approach to content management and quickly discovered Microsoft Syntex.

Putting data at users’ fingertips

To get started with Microsoft Syntex, TaylorMade connected with Lighthouse, a Gold competency member of the Microsoft Partner Network. With expertise in compliance, security, and information governance, Lighthouse was the ideal consulting partner for the job.

Microsoft Syntex content processing uses AI to recognize repeated fields within documents to properly ingest and tag information, helping ensure that content is properly stored, governed, and searchable for the right team members. “This increases learning, decreases the amount of manual labor and complexity, and increases throughput in terms of the ability to look at documents, manage them, and keep them within the risk tolerances that our clients expect,” says Paul Moye, Executive Director of Strategic Partnerships at Lighthouse.

After TaylorMade provided more than 200 patent and trademark documents, Lighthouse analyzed the content to understand which fields were important to ingest. It then trained the Microsoft Syntex models to recognize the fields and apply the proper metadata. With this metadata applied, TaylorMade can now properly classify information and keep it more secure.

Building toward a better future with Microsoft Syntex

With Microsoft Syntex, TaylorMade’s lawyers have more time to deal with legal matters while also ensuring that legal documents are both protected and accessible to the right team members. “The more time we save our legal team from having to file and search for documents and actually do the work of attorneys is of huge value,” says Chitsaz.

TaylorMade’s journey with Lighthouse and Microsoft Syntex doesn’t end there. As new Microsoft Syntex features become available, the company’s dream of improving its processes continues to grow. From translating documents in Mandarin and Japanese to creating new ways of searching for and annotating information, the teams at TaylorMade are eager to scale AI across the company’s processes. For example, “To be able to take a screenshot of a slide when you’re watching a video and then being able to search that six months later is going to prove immensely valuable for us because there’s so much lost that isn’t searchable,” says Chitsaz.

Lighthouse shares this excitement. “Microsoft Syntex is a really great tool for our clients,” says Chelsey Vance, Senior Advisory Consultant at Lighthouse. “Especially with new capabilities coming out that will help them with data classification, process automation, and applying information protection controls.”

Combining its determination to explore new approaches with the expertise of Lighthouse and continual advancements to content AI with Microsoft Syntex, the future for TaylorMade is bright.

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