Wilshire Accelerates Investment Process with Ontra’s Contract Automation

Challenge

A high volume of NDAs impedes Wilshire’s service capacity and growth

When Sandy Choi, Wilshire’s new General Counsel and Head of Compliance, joined the firm last year, she became concerned about the legal department’s ability to support a quickly growing business with an ever-increasing volume of contracts. They needed a solution that would allow the company to focus more on the business of investing and less on the administration of ordinary course contracts. As the company was also actively engaged in strategic M&A, surge legal resources were needed to give the in-house team greater capacity for integrations and divestitures.

Even with an agile team of 12 legal and compliance professionals, Sandy realized Wilshire needed more personnel to fulfill all its business requirements. Negotiating, reviewing, and tracking a growing number of NDAs and technology vendor agreements had become a significant burden, as the in-house team of experienced investment management lawyers was moonlighting as NDA or technology contract negotiators while managing new fund products and client requests throughout the day.

That’s when Sandy started looking for dedicated lawyers to manage NDAs. After searching and talking to several candidates, outsourced legal providers, and smaller law firms, it became clear that none of the traditional resources fit their needs. Wilshire needed an automated, cost-effective solution that could scale with their business.

Solution

Ontra Contract Automation gives Wilshire more bandwidth and room for growth

The sheer volume of NDAs initially drove Wilshire to seek something more efficient than increasing headcount. While searching online for a better solution to the manual administration of NDAs, Wilshire found Contact Automation, Ontra’s AI-powered, human-in-the-loop contract negotiation platform, and saw immediate potential. Given the traditional, more burdensome alternatives, the decision to adopt Ontra’s Contract Automation was quick.

Ontra’s Contract Automation solution provided answers to Wilshire’s concerns about tracking the status of contracts efficiently and avoiding costly errors, including:

• What happens to an NDA after it’s executed?
• Where can I find it as a repository?
• Who in the organization and outside have reviewed it?
• How can we track similar provisions across a high volume of contracts?

Since introducing Ontra Contract Automation, Wilshire’s in-house lawyers have helped the investment team increase the number of new deals that can be reviewed in a significantly shorter timeframe. Processing the NDAs through Ontra gave the investment team faster access to investment materials and data rooms to begin their investment due diligence process.

“The Ontra NDA process allows us to standardize our negotiated terms easily, frees up time, and most importantly, allows our investment team to look at more investment opportunities in the market in a shorter time frame. The benefits go beyond increasing the legal team’s capacity; Ontra is expanding the firm’s capacity,” states Sandy Choi.

Wilshire expands Contract Automation to manage 3rd-party contracts

Although Wilshire started using Contract Automation to manage only its NDA processes, Sandy almost immediately expanded the firm’s use of the platform to include vendor agreements. In some cases, using Ontra has become Wilshire’s default way of handling outside agreements.

“Adding third-party vendor agreements to our Ontra platform also allowed us greater visibility into the contracts that keep the business running and is a great tracker for legal department resource management. Everything from the holiday party venue agreement to an extensive data license agreement is housed on Ontra, which can track the reviewer and terms easily,” Sandy explained.

Ontra’s ability to apply a standardized playbook—including negotiation preferences on common contract provisions, preferred approaches to negotiation markups, instructions for escalating issues, and model language—to a diverse set of contracts gives Wilshire the ability to identify where the firm needs to probe further and where it can take a step back.

Working with Ontra’s Contract Automation platform and its team of legal professionals has been seamless for Sandy and the Wilshire legal team. Ontra provides the firm with high-level expertise and responsive, professional service.

Sandy notes that a great benefit of using Ontra is its pre-prescribed processes and the availability and responsiveness of the team of dedicated support people and legal professionals. She particularly appreciates the ability to get timely responses—even for specifics not yet defined in the playbook.

At this point, Sandy feels the only limiting factor to adopting more Ontra solutions at Wilshire is her ability to review and project manage all the tools and capabilities available to Wilshire through Ontra’s suite of product offerings.