Ontra’s Automated Entity Management Saves Time and Creates a Single Source of Truth for Motive Partners

Challenge

Firm seeks automated workflows to ease the bandwidth strain of manual entity management

When Lindsay Rutishauser joined as Principal and Chief Compliance Officer at Motive Partners, the private equity firm relied on spreadsheets to manually manage entity data and on decks to create structure charts. This manual approach demanded far too much of her limited bandwidth, which she explained was “not the best use of [her] time considering the very lean legal department.”

Rutishauser recalled, “I spent a ton of time making structure charts on slides for KYC and investor requests, and I was trying to find a way to make that a more streamlined process.” Since traditional methods weren’t meeting the firm’s needs, Rutishauser spearheaded the search for a modern technology solution. Her goals with such a solution were to lessen the burden of entity management and structure chart creation while establishing a central source of truth for all entity data and supporting documentation.

Solution

Atlas creates an AI-enabled single source of truth for entity data and automates entity management workflows

Rutishauser heard about Ontra’s AI-powered entity management platform, Atlas, when the product was in development. As a customer of both Ontra’s Contract Automation and Insight products, the Motive Partners’ team was already familiar with Ontra, so Rutishauser was eager to implement the new tool. “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 co-development partner, Rutishauser collaborated with Ontra—brainstorming and providing feedback to help make Atlas an effective solution purposely designed 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.

Rutishauser also 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.”

In addition to 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.

The team at Motive Partners underscored that it was happy with the automated, efficient entity management process that Atlas facilitated. Rutishauser shared that the tool unlocked additional productivity for her team while also mitigating the risk of errors or non-compliance. She summed up the solution’s effects: “We’re very focused on ensuring that our legal team utilizes best-in-class technology in order to provide high-quality legal support to our firm, and a robust entity management solution makes all the difference. Atlas is an example of an application that will allow my team to achieve greater levels of productivity while mitigating risk.”

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.”