With Hurricane Sandy’s recent visit to the Northeastern United States knocking out power and transit systems, a lot of lawyers got an unplanned break from work this past week. While this may have been like a bad weather vacation for some (at least those who didn’t lose power or water (unlike me)), busy lawyers will have to pay for the time off with some serious catchup work. My guess is no one covered your deals while you were away. Work that should have been done Monday–Wednesday didn’t get done then and it didn’t go away. Deal deadlines aren’t necessarily going to get pushed out because of the storm.
We can’t help you get caught up on everything, but, to the extent you have a pile of due diligence contract review left undone because of the storm, our system can help. It takes a first pass at creating due diligence summary charts: quickly and accurately reading agreements for user specified provisions (e.g., assignment, change of control, amendment, license grant) and putting findings into summary charts. This saves associate time, and helps generate more accurate results in due diligence contract reviews in the process.
Perhaps you just need to get due diligence contract review done quickly and don’t have a hurricane to blame—a regular situation, in my Biglaw practice experience. Deals often need to get done in short time periods, and teams can have to grind out a lot of long nights to make them happen. (Putting aside how our software helps help catch errors made by over-tired people) DiligenceEngine can really speed up due diligence contract review. We’ve found it takes an experienced associate somewhere from one to five minutes per page to review a contract (if they are actually reading it). And creating and populating diligence summary charts takes time too; cutting and pasting verbatim language from contracts into summary charts doesn’t happen automatically (at least without our software)! DiligenceEngine reviews contracts in seconds per page. If you need to get a lot of contracts reviewed for due diligence, you really should check our software out. And, by the way, law firms (even ones that charge by hours billed) can make more money being more efficient.
While we’re on the subject of DiligenceEngine being fast, the system is also quick to get started on. It’s cloud based so there is nothing to install—all you need is an internet connection and web browser. And the system is intuitive enough to use without training (especially after our recent interface enhancements).
