Private market firms have a problem — their contract negotiation processes are a mess.
Manual tasks, multiple versions flying around, legal teams buried in tedious redlining, and no one knowing where anything stands. The real cost isn’t just wasted time; it’s the deals firms could be closing faster. It’s a significant bottleneck that can prevent firms from capitalizing on market opportunities.
It’s time for firms to move past simply managing routine agreements and leverage technology to turn their contract workflow into a strategic deal acceleration advantage.
This article explores how manual legacy workflows have become a critical vulnerability for private markets and reveals how purpose-built, AI-powered software is fundamentally transforming negotiations.
Challenges of manual contract negotiation
The current contract workflow in many private markets firms is a labyrinth of inefficiency, and the core issue lies in the lack of a centralized, systematic approach.
Ontra customers have told us about their key challenges:
- Version-control chaos: Negotiating a contract manually means multiple versions are flying back and forth via email. This leads to confusion, errors, and the risk of finalizing an outdated or incorrect document.
- Time-consuming redlining and clause analysis: Legal teams spend an inordinate amount of time on repetitive, low-value tasks like redlining and manually checking each clause against internal standards or past precedents. This takes away from higher-value, strategic work.
- Lack of visibility: Without a central system, it’s impossible to get a real-time, comprehensive view of where a contract is in the negotiation process. Is it with the counterparty? Awaiting internal review? This lack of visibility can lead to missed deadlines and delayed deal execution.
- Knowledge silos: Negotiated agreements and critical terms from past deals often remain trapped in individual inboxes or on shared drives. This makes it difficult to leverage historical data and negotiation strategies, forcing teams to start each contract review from scratch and potentially leading to inconsistent terms.
Private markets firms experiencing these issues and others are in the right position to adopt AI-powered software and drastically improve repetitive negotiation workflows.
Benefits of contract negotiation software
Contract negotiation software can completely transform the contract lifecycle management process, turning it from a reactive, manual effort into a proactive, strategic one. Instead of just managing documents and negotiations, firms can oversee a streamlined, data-driven workflow.
A contract negotiation solution provides:
- Enhanced consistency: The software helps ensure that all legally binding documents adhere to the firm’s established standards and contract playbooks. This reduces risk and ensures consistency across all business contracts, a critical concern for highly regulated industries.
- Improved collaboration: A centralized platform allows all stakeholders — from legal teams to investment professionals — to collaborate on the same document with clear version control. This eliminates email back-and-forth and ensures everyone is working with the most up-to-date version.
- Accelerated deal execution: Negotiation software drastically reduces turnaround times and final contract execution by automating repetitive tasks, such as redlining, and providing a single source of truth for all contract terms. This allows firms to execute deals and capitalize on market opportunities faster.
- Data-driven insights: Negotiation software transforms static documents into a rich source of data. It aggregates insights on negotiation trends, common clauses, and more. This allows firms to make smarter decisions, refine their negotiation strategies, and gain a competitive edge.
The need for an industry-specific solution
While a generic, horizontal tech solution might seem like a plausible first step, it often falls short of meeting the complex demands of the private markets. A one-size-fits-all tool can’t handle the nuances of private equity contracts, which are often highly customized, complex, and tied to specific regulatory requirements.
Private equity firms need more than just basic document management. They require a solution that understands the intricacies of their deal processes, including NDAs, joinders, and complex side letters.
A dedicated, industry-specific platform offers tailored features, deep domain knowledge, and a security infrastructure built to handle highly confidential and sensitive information. It’s about moving beyond simply digitizing a manual process to fundamentally rethinking and optimizing the entire contract workflow.
Ontra: The best AI-powered negotiation software for private markets
Ontra’s negotiation solutions address the specific challenges private markets firms face, allowing them to accelerate and standardize contract negotiations with unprecedented efficiency and confidence.
We use AI-powered data extraction and document processing to transform data locked in our customers’ documents into expert-validated, actionable intelligence.
AI enables our contract negotiation solutions to summarize documents, compare language across agreements, and suggest language based on a customer’s past agreements and digital contract playbook.
➡️ Contract Automation combines purpose-built, industry-specific AI capabilities and an experienced global network of legal professionals to efficiently and effectively handle routine legal agreements.
➡️ Accord is AI-powered negotiation software that enables private markets firms to negotiate, analyze, and manage their routine contracts in-house, faster, at a lower cost, and with fewer resources than traditional methods.
Accelerate and standardize negotiation
Ontra’s AI-powered solutions — Contract Automation and Accord — are designed to make the negotiation process faster and more precise. The core features include:
- Digital Playbooks: This feature allows firms to standardize their negotiation strategies by digitally documenting preferred, fallback, and final positions for common clauses. This ensures consistency and compliance across every single deal, regardless of who is negotiating.
- Markup Builder: This AI-enabled tool automates the redlining process by suggesting editable markups based on the firm’s playbook and historical precedent. Instead of starting from scratch, legal and deal teams can quickly draft and apply pre-approved language, accelerating contract processes.
- Similar Documents: This powerful tool allows users to rapidly search and leverage relevant past agreements. This means you can benchmark a new agreement against a library of previously negotiated agreements, ensuring that you’re always aligned with precedent and can quickly find a win-win solution.
Unlock actionable insights
One of the most valuable aspects of Ontra is its ability to turn unstructured contract data into actionable intelligence. Contract Automation and Accord give private markets firms access to:
- Summaries: After a negotiation, the platform automatically generates summaries of key contract terms. This provides a concise overview for internal stakeholders, enabling informed, confident decision-making and faster approvals.
- Playbook Alignment Reports: These reports give firms a clear view of adherence to or deviation from their digital playbooks at various stages of negotiation. This helps identify negotiation trends and provides crucial insights into team performance, allowing for continuous improvement of negotiation strategies.
- Negotiation Trend Analysis: By aggregating data across all of a customers’ negotiated agreements, Ontra’s reports reveal broader patterns and market standards. This allows firms to understand what is being agreed upon in the market and adjust their own approach accordingly.
Ontra’s value proposition is simple yet profound: it frees up your most valuable resource — your people — to focus on strategic, high-value work that truly drives returns. It moves firms away from reactive, manual legal and compliance processes to proactive, data-driven ones. The result is more efficient, confident, and ultimately, more successful firms.
Ready to stop managing repetitive contracts? Reach out for a Contract Automation or Accord demo today.
