Challenge

Lean legal team seeks tech-driven solution to expedite repetitive, time-intensive tasks

New York-headquartered Motive Partners, a fintech-specialist private equity firm, sought to alleviate the demands and tedium of increasingly complex legal workflows. Despite taking an innovative approach to its investment strategy, the firm still relied on traditional, manual processes for many of its legal operations. When Principal and Chief Compliance Officer Lindsay Rutishauser joined Motive Partners, she sought modern, tech-driven solutions to expedite legal workflows and free the lean team from repetitive, time-intensive tasks.

She explained, “We want to walk the walk, not just talk the talk, with technology. Seeking legal tech was part of a broader initiative across our operations group and the firm as a whole to make sure we are leveraging technology in a strategic way and being thoughtful about deploying state-of-the-art solutions.”

Contract Automation drastically reduces time spent on NDAs and accelerates negotiations by 2X

The search for legal tech led Motive Partners to Ontra’s Contract Automation, an end-to-end, AI-powered contract negotiation solution designed to streamline and accelerate the processing of routine legal agreements. Specifically, the firm wanted to alleviate the persistent frustrations, bandwidth demands, and delays caused by manually processing NDAs. Initially, Motive Partners took a traditional approach – hiring an outside law firm to review NDAs while managing the workflow in-house.

Even with an outside law firm, the amount of time legal had to spend managing the process became problematic. Achieving better business results mandated that NDA negotiations be completed quickly so that the deal teams could begin reviewing the opportunity faster.

Rutishauser recalled, “With our small legal team, I needed to be very strategic in how I spent my time. NDAs were occupying a significant chunk of time, so I was looking for a solution that would make that process more efficient.”

Following a self-described “super easy” onboarding process, Motive Partners leveraged Contract Automation’s AI-enabled data insights and workflow tools to reduce the strain on internal resources. Ontra created a Digital Playbook of Motive Partners’ negotiation preferences, eliminating time-consuming back-and-forth by ensuring that Motive Partners’ dedicated team at Ontra understood the firm’s priorities.

Contract Automation has facilitated extremely efficient NDA negotiations, enabling the entire business to move faster. Rutishauser reported that she went from spending five hours a week on NDAs to just 15 minutes a week after the team implemented Contract Automation. She added, “The deal team has been thrilled, too. We’ve reduced our average negotiation time for NDAs from three or four business days to 1.7 business days, which means we’re able to free up more time in our day to spend on more critical work.”

Insight digitizes more than 6,000 LPA and side letter obligations for greater compliance and audit readiness

Following the firm’s successful implementation of Contract Automation, Rutishauser noted, “We realized that the Ontra solution was the way of the future. As a private equity firm, our investors are one of our most important stakeholders, and we wanted to ensure that we were using state-of-the-art technology to honor our commitments to them.”

Continuing its efforts to modernize legal workflows, Motive Partners adopted Ontra’s Insight solution to manage investor obligations and compliance processes. Rutishauser detailed the firm’s need, “We were using large PDF charts to manage investor obligations, which was clunky and inefficient. We wanted a process that was more seamless and streamlined, and we specifically wanted to leverage technology. Insight was a logical way to utilize technology and move away from 300-page PDF charts.”

Through Insight’s onboarding process, Motive Partners transformed their side letters into structured data, creating a single source of truth for all the provisions and corresponding obligations they agreed to.

The firm has digitized thousands of side letter obligations in Insight since beginning to use the platform. As a result, the firm has simplified its audit readiness and investor obligations and improved its compliance processes. Insight also saved Rutishauser at least five hours per month and an estimated 10 hours on the annual review.

Insight also helped Motive Partners adopt a more proactive and comprehensive approach to compliance. Per Rutishauser, “From an audit perspective, there was always a lot of time spent in the annual review process to show compliance with side letter provisions. That’s been made very easy with Insight – now we can export fund documents and data to prove side letter compliance in just a few clicks.”

Atlas creates a single source of truth for entity information and automates entity management workflows

Rutishauser heard about Ontra’s AI-powered entity management platform, Atlas, when the product was in development and joined as a co-development partner. “I was spending a lot of time on structure charts and similar administrative tasks—which was not the best use of my time. It was really exciting to work as a co-development partner with Ontra from the beginning of the product development,” Rutishauser stated.

As a customer of Ontra’s Contract Automation and Insight products, the Motive Partners’ team was already proficient with Ontra platforms, and Rutishauser was eager to implement the new tool. The private equity firm relied on spreadsheets and decks to manually manage entity data and create structure charts. This manual approach demanded an inordinate amount of her limited bandwidth, which she explained was “not the best use of [her] time considering the very lean legal department.” As a co-development partner, she collaborated with Ontra, helping to brainstorm and provide feedback to make Atlas an effective solution purpose-built for entity management in private equity.

After the firm signed up for Atlas, the AI-assisted digitization, consolidation, and organization of entity information took just one month. Motive Partners’ legal team quickly adapted to the tool, finding it intuitive and easy to use. Rutishauser noted that Atlas significantly accelerated the overall entity management process. The solution also made creating and customizing structure charts much easier and facilitated effortless visibility into entity ownership and relationships. She estimates Atlas saved the firm two hours per week on structure charts alone.

In addition, Rutishauser emphasized the benefits of a centralized digital repository for entity data and documents, saying, “It’s a big deal to have a single source of truth where I don’t have to worry about version control because everything lives in Atlas.”

Besides solving the firm’s top-of-mind pain points, the automated workflows and algorithmically generated structure charts in Atlas allowed Motive Partners to interact with its entity data in new and different ways. This fresh approach laid the foundation for continued innovation of entity management processes. “I’m excited about our new roadmap and where we’re going because now that we’ve digitized our entity information, it opens up the potential for a lot of really interesting use cases for AI down the line,” explained Rutishauser.

Results

Ontra’s private markets technology platform helps Motive Partners’ legal team spend their time where it matters most

According to Rutishauser, the three products in Ontra’s private markets technology platform worked together cohesively to create a convenient one-stop shop for Motive Partners’ legal workflows. She specified, “Ontra helps me do my job more efficiently and allows me to spend my time where it matters most rather than on more administrative tasks.” Having a single source of truth for all entities and obligations made visibility, collaboration, and efficiency easier than ever.

Rutishauser concluded by sharing how the Ontra team’s passion for legal technology has positively impacted Motive Partners. “It’s such a solution-focused team. They’re always listening to customers, trying to identify how to improve their product, and anticipating the next pain point to solve,” she said. “It’s been energizing to work with a team that’s focused on making my life easier and helping elevate in-house attorneys to deliver great work to their internal clients.”