San Miguel County Strikes Gold, Supercharging Agreement Management with Docusign

Nestled between rugged mountains and expansive ranchlands, San Miguel County, Colorado, has balanced natural beauty with an industrious spirit for more than 140 years. Once a booming gold and silver mining hub, it’s now best known for the Telluride Ski Resort.

The county's communities are as diverse as its landscape, so the county government can't take a one-size-fits-all approach. With only 130 employees, the administration provides services ranging from road and bridge maintenance to public health and property assessments. It’s a big challenge to address the needs of communities of various sizes, and like many municipalities, San Miguel County has to stretch its limited resources further each year. 

“The county government is doing more with fewer people,” said Deputy Clerk to the San Miguel County Board Carmen Warfield. “It’s a battle to meet people’s needs while keeping our sanity.”

To meet growing demands, San Miguel turned to the Docusign Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) platform to digitize workflows, accelerate agreement finalization, and improve constituent services—making processes faster, simpler, and more efficient.

Tackling a mountain of paperwork

Before adopting Docusign IAM, San Miguel County’s document management process was cumbersome, manual, and time-intensive. Staff printed contracts, wrote cover letters, and mailed physical documents with self-addressed return envelopes. As a result, signed documents for critical funding applications could take weeks—or even months—to return. Some never made it back at all.

Agreements were stored in physical folders and filing cabinets, organized by year. While some were scanned and saved to individual computers, the process was inconsistent, and files weren’t searchable. The county’s IT department had set up a dedicated document server and attempted to implement an agenda management system for board meeting notes and minutes. But the server fell into disuse, and the agenda tool lacked the archival capabilities needed to build a complete, centralized digital repository.

Finding a single document could take 45–60 minutes, with no definitive source of truth. Employees manually tracked agreement expirations in personal calendars, and residents felt the impact—there was no way to guarantee responses to constituent requests within the mandated three-day window.

The county tested several agenda management systems, but none were robust enough. They needed a comprehensive platform to permanently store and easily access all documents. Deputy Clerk Carmen Warfield even considered scanning the archive herself, but the task would require two or three full-time employees. Beyond being impractical, it was tedious, repetitive work that took time away from higher-impact projects serving constituents.

Then they discovered Docusign IAM—and everything changed.

 A phased transition to Docusign

Moving away from paper-based processes didn’t happen overnight. San Miguel County started slowly, first deploying Docusign in the attorney’s office, which handled the highest volume of contracts. The team has since onboarded 10 active departments, with HR next in line to digitize welcome packages—eliminating hundreds of printed pages and moving the county one step closer to its environmental goals.

With Docusign IAM and Navigator, the county has automated agreement workflows, centralized documents into a single searchable repository, and cut document retrieval time to just two or three seconds. Files are no longer siloed, and automated reminders ensure contracts never miss a renewal date.  

Docusign also helps county employees build trust with residents. Staff can respond to information requests quickly and thoroughly, meeting the county’s three-day response window and increasing transparency into the activities of elected officials, such as the Board of County Commissioners.

The team has uploaded agreements dating back to 2015, creating a single source of truth that increases visibility, expands access across departments, and builds public trust by helping staff meet a three-day response window for information requests. Warfield is championing a new policy requiring every new county contract to be processed through Docusign—further streamlining the signature process, ensuring consistent records management, and laying a strategic foundation for more transparent, efficient operations in the years ahead.

Already, Docusign IAM  is delivering measurable benefits—faster processes, streamlined collaboration, and eco-friendly workflows—with even greater impact still ahead.