Industry
Legal Services
Location
Minneapolis, MN
Use Case
Due Diligence
Client Type
Law Firm
Case Study: Fredrikson Law increases due diligence efficiency Firm-wide by over 20%
Quick Facts
Fredrikson & Byron is a 275-attorney law firm based in Minneapolis, with additional offices in Iowa, North Dakota, Mexico and China. Fredrikson & Byron has a reputation as the firm "where law and business meet". Fredrikson attorneys bring business acumen and entrepreneurial thinking to work with clients, and operate as business advisors and strategic partners, as well as legal counselors.
The firm has used Kira extensively in its M&A practice, which has helped streamline the document review process and increase the speed of review. In 2018, Fredrikson was tasked by a client to complete a due diligence M&A review of over 500 documents (including NDAs, employer agreements, etc.) with a tight turnaround time of five working days. Using Kira, the firm was able to complete the project early, delivering a more complete work product, and requiring a fraction of the person hours, than would have been possible without Kira.
Key Outcomes
48%
est. time savings of person hours required for the project
20+
Associates trained on Kira firm-wide
22%
estimated increase in due diligence efficiency using Kira
The Project
Although not part of the original M&A deal itself, Fredrikson & Byron was tasked by a large client with a time sensitive due diligence project. The client needed approx. 550 documents quickly reviewed in five working days. In order to gauge the scope of the project, an initial manual review of 10 contracts was conducted, resulting in a 100-hour estimate for the overall project (split between both paralegals and associates at the firm). Furthermore, the client also requested daily updates on the due diligence in a special format.
How Kira Helped
Fredrikson’s client expected a project turn-around time of five days; however, by leveraging the power of Kira’s contract review software, the reviewing team was able to finish the project in approximately three days. The final time spent on the project was 52 hours, resulting in a 48% estimated time savings. Further to the amount of time saved, Kira was also able to assist in providing spreadsheets to help deliver daily updates to the client. The project came in under budget, with the client further inquiring about the technology and scheduling a follow-up call to discuss the usage of Kira for future projects.
The use of Kira allowed us to more efficiently review and pull key information from a voluminous set of documents for a time-sensitive issue. In addition, throughout the matter, Kira’s features assisted with the general organization and identification of key contracts and terms.
Erik Malinowski, Shareholder at Fredrikson
How they Worked Together
The team consisted of 3 associates and 1 paralegal, all previously trained on Kira. There was no need to train the software past its built-in components; the team was able to strictly use the existing built-in provision models on Kira to find and extract the information they needed. The majority of the time spent during the review was spent on reconfiguring Kira’s output to the same format as the client.
Upon conducting further reviews of efficiency improvements, Fredrikson estimated that Kira use can increase due diligence efficiency by more than 20%. All new M&A associates at the firm are now being trained on Kira as a tool to assist in conducting due diligence. The adoption of Kira is one of the many ways Fredrikson continues to embrace its firm-wide priority of using technology to create exceptional value for its clients.