How Coast Gets Instant Employment Law Answers With SixFifty AI

The challenge

Coast’s growth outpaced the patchwork of generic HR compliance tools

When Coast, a B2B fintech startup providing fleet and fuel card management solutions, began expanding from its New York headquarters into three new states, general counsel Renata Stepanov quickly realized their approach to employment law needed to be more airtight.

Like many first-time GCs, Stepanov had no formal HR experience and had to rely on a patchwork of software and legal resources to make sure Coast wasn’t exposing itself to unnecessary risk.

“We use a PEO, and a lot of our standard day-to-day stuff—like payroll, benefits administration, leave requests—gets routed through them,” said Stepanov. “And then we also have outside counsel that we go to for particularly tricky questions.”

It was in attempting to create Coast’s first formal employee handbook that Stepanov began to notice gaps and inefficiencies in the current set of resources she was relying on: 

• Going to outside counsel any time she had specific questions about things like final paycheck requirements or county-specific hiring requirements was too costly. Stepanov needed a way to find accurate answers to employment questions independently, without relying on potentially unreliable sources like ChatGPT and Google search.
• The employee handbook tool, Mineral, that her PEO offered proved too generic to be of use, lacking the flexibility to customize employment policies for new states or non-standard business needs (like creating a flexible time-off policy) due to infrequent updates to its legal library. “Updating our handbook was hard,” said Stepanov. “There just weren’t a lot of ways to customize and organize what it generated.”

Once Stepanov and Coast found SixFifty, those concerns started to disappear.

“There are so many different types of policies we have to make one-off decisions about, and we often need to rejigger stuff on our own,” said Stepanov. “SixFifty was versatile in allowing us to easily generate individual policies and keep them updated as the law changes.”

The solution

SixFifty’s AI search and hiring tools made it easy for Coast to stay compliant

One of the most immediate ways Stepanov was able to get value was by treated SixFifty was as her first stop for legal research—in particular, by leveraging SixFifty AI to find swift, accurate answers to crucial, everyday employment questions (such as state-specific paycheck rules upon employee termination and nuanced adjustments to leave policy).

Built on SixFifty’s renowned Research library of human-drafted legal entries, SixFifty AI provided lightning-fast answers and a much more accurate conversational search experience than broadly trained GPT agents.

Why SixFifty AI?

• Legal answers on-demand: SixFifty AI eliminated guesswork and the need for Coast’s general counsel and people team to sift through online resources—or consult costly external attorneys for straightforward queries.
• Instant time-savings: By reducing time spent manually researching laws and cross-referencing sources to find accurate answers, Stepanov was able to free up time for more strategic initiatives.
• Reliability: Because SixFifty AI sources answers from data in SixFifty Research—a library of regularly-updated, human-vetted legal info written in plain language instead of legalese —Coast was able to make confident policy decisions without worrying about misinformation or outdated guidelines.

“There’s some trust I have that SixFifty’s AI tool is vetted and fed with information that is more reliable than just going to ChatGPT, where there’s a chance of there being some sort of hallucination. It’s been very helpful.” – Renata Stepanov

Beyond using SixFifty AI, Stepanov has leveraged SixFifty to enter new states smoothly, utilizing the platform to generate Policies, Addenda, Separation Agreements, and Offer Letters, all of which proved particularly useful when Coast recently opened its second office location in Utah and hired its first remote employee in California.

Stepanov called out SixFifty’s Hiring Kit as a particularly useful tool for combining information on entering a new state into a helpful, easy-to-follow checklist.

“There are definitely tools where you can just download a generic offer letter or agreement, but they become insufficient as soon as you need to tailor it to your business,” said Stepanov. “The Hiring Kit gave me a lot of comfort that I was missing something during the process of planning out our Utah office; it wasn’t just another form, but a roadmap.”

The impact

Coast saves hours of research per month using reliable employment data

With SixFifty, Coast dramatically improved its operational efficiency, amounting to an estimated $25,000 in annual savings on outside counsel fees, according to Stepanov.

And even when Stepanov has had to turn to outside counsel to review a particularly sensitive document, she found that SixFifty has more than held its own against one of the toughest audiences to please.

“In one case, I had a question for outside counsel related to a separation agreement that was generated in SixFifty, and he didn’t really have any comments on the form itself,” said Stepanov. “That gave me a lot of trust that SixFifty’s form generator is producing something that is enforceable.”

In short, with SixFifty as its compliance partner, Coast has been able to simplify onboarding and empower new HR team members to independently handle complex employment scenarios, allowing the fast-growing startup to set a scalable foundation for future growth.

“Having a central knowledge database like SixFifty has also made it easier to onboard,” said Stepanov. “When we made our first People Ops hire, I didn’t have to give her links to 50 different Google Docs, spreadsheets, and folders where we keep disparate pieces of information about laws and requirements of all the states we operate in, wondering if they’re updated or not.”

“I just pointed her to SixFifty.”