Robert Ambrogi Blog
As the global pandemic has forced lawyers and clients into working from home, many law firms have realized that standard ways of closing deals and signing documents are no longer viable.
That point was driven home recently when Dentons, the world’s largest law firm, said that its U.S. real estate practice would now use the cloud platform Litera Transact to manage complex financing and lending deals for one of the largest bank-based financial services companies in the U.S.
Before the pandemic hit, Dentons had already been in the process of transitioning to Litera Transact, Litera CEO Avaneesh Marwaha told me during a recent interview. But the pandemic accelerated the transition.
Avaneesh Marwaha
“What we’re hearing from them is that Litera Transact is helping deals get completed in a quicker and more efficient manner,” Marwaha said.
This is also notable, Marwaha said, because it demonstrates that transaction-management technology such as Litera Transact — which evolved from products originally intended to be used for mergers and acquisitions — can be used to speed up the process for any type of complex commercial transaction.
In the past, the real estate group had followed a more-traditional workflow, manually updating diligence and closing checklists and circulating updates by email to those involved in the deal.
Litera Transact is the product that Litera created after it acquired two of the leading deal-management platforms, Doxly, which it acquired in August 2019, and Workshare Transact, which was part of its acquisition of the U.K. company Workshare a month earlier in July 2019.
It provides various functions related to managing and closing a deal, including:
- Templated closing checklists to help manage each stage of a deal.
- Signature management and automation via DocuSign.
- Closing books, including editing, organization, and creation.
- Data rooms, to collect and manage all diligence documents in a single location.
As I reported here in March, Litera responded to the global pandemic by offering six months of no-cost access to a lite version of Litera Transact.
“Litera Transact helps us cut the administrative tasks of sending emails and updating checklists, which in turn helps our clients save money,” Chuqin Xing Anderson, managing associate in Dentons’ real estate practice, said in a case study published by the company. “As a result, we can focus on more sophisticated work.”
With this deal, Litera said, there are now more than 100 firms worldwide using Litera Transact.