Ontra Accord Boosts Productivity by 67% for Private Equity Firm

Challenge

Private equity firm seeks to enhance NDA consistency and team efficiency

To fulfill its strategic vision and priorities for greater efficiency, consistency, and control, the North America-based private equity firm needed a way to ensure consistency across NDAs while remaining agile and responsive enough to turn a deal quickly. Relying on internal teams to negotiate, review, and manage NDAs posed several challenges for the firm and its partners. Without an internal legal team, investment professionals were responsible for ensuring they used the correct terms and identified language buried in the NDA that could pose problems in the future.

Investment professionals spent more time handling NDAs and less on deal-making and revenue generation. During urgent deals, they struggled to turn around NDAs quickly, putting closing deals at risk. As the firm continued to grow, the partners felt pressure to address the lost productivity and inconsistency that resulted from their current NDA processes. Although the private equity firm had considered outsourcing, leadership quickly decided that the solution didn’t meet their priorities or give them enough control over preferences.

“We explored outsourcing but determined that Ontra Accord provided the best balance of efficiency, control, and cost-effectiveness.” Managing Partner, Private Equity Firm

Solution

Shaping a new way for NDA management as an early adopter

As the partners started looking for ways to improve processes and make deal-making more efficient, they knew Ontra as the global leader in AI legal tech for private markets. It seemed like a natural fit to implement Ontra solutions and become an early customer of Accord, Ontra’s new complete software solution for negotiating, analyzing, and managing contracts.

“We partnered with Ontra to help guide the product development and ensure that it fits our needs.” Managing Partner, Private Equity Firm

The firm’s focus on transforming Accord into a comprehensive workflow solution that creates greater efficiencies has led to rapid new feature development, such as adding DocuSign functionality.

AI-powered workflows make NDAs less burdensome

Since adopting Accord, the private equity firm’s partners have gained the efficiency and consistency they sought. As a bonus, investment professionals and partners have found greater peace of mind and confidence knowing the platform surfaces and suggests editable markups for NDAs based on the firm’s preferences. They benefit from the ability to develop a unique Digital Playbook that ensures adherence to the firm’s preferences. The firm has formalized and enhanced its existing NDA review framework with Accord to create a more standardized and efficient process.

Team members can now draft markups quickly using Markup Builder, an AI-enabled feature that suggests editable markups based on the precedent library of historical negotiations and Digital Playbook preferences.

Greater consistency and efficiency are the future for the private equity firm

The firm continues to work alongside Ontra to create a complete workflow solution. Looking beyond NDAs, the partners look forward to using Accord’s capabilities to compare other documents, like engagement letters, to earlier versions and use the summary function to improve the visibility of negotiation progress and outcomes.

Since implementing Accord, the roles of the partners and investment teams have shifted from drafting and reviewing documents to quickly editing them, saving investment professionals considerable time and giving partners confidence in NDA outcomes. When partners and investment team members encountered non-routine agreements, deciding on the terms, searching for precedents, and writing the correct phrasing was time-consuming and frustrating. Accord now completes this work in minutes, enabling the teams to quickly adjust the language and submit the agreement with confidence.

Results

AI-enabled tools increase productivity by 67% by using fewer internal resources

The private equity firm has leveraged Accord to reduce the time spent on NDAs by 67% across the organization and noticed an increase in the quality and consistency of their contracts. Previously, firm members would commit up to 45 minutes to reviewing each NDA. Although still in the early stages of adoption, Accord’s Similar Documents feature has already surfaced matches for new contracts against prior contracts. The firm’s precedent library continues to expand over time, improving the tool’s ability to find matching contracts and build additional markup suggestions.

Accord has delivered a single solution for the private equity firm’s NDA workstreams, eliminating the need for investment professionals to start each negotiation from scratch, search for precedents, or remember preferred terms and language. As a result, investment professionals spend more time on revenue generation, and partners are confident that the agreements they sign will be compliant and consistent with the firm’s strategy.

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