Fir Tree Partners

Slashes Contract Negotiation Turnaround Time by 50% With Ontra.
What Was Accomplished:
100%
Outsourcing of NDAs and vendor contracts
50%
Reduction in NDA turnaround time
100%
Access to instant insights from all contracts
Key Results:
Faster NDA negotiations
Access to valuable contract data
Standardized negotiation practices
Ontra Product(s) Used:
Contract Automation

Background

Fir Tree Partners, a New York-based private investment firm that invests worldwide in the public and private markets, discovered a previously untapped opportunity to improve their legal operations, reduce costs, speed up time-to-investment, and help grow the firm’s business.

“Since partnering with Ontra to process routine legal contracts, we’ve saved an extraordinary amount of time and resources. Our team can now focus on higher value work and strategic initiatives; the legal department is seen as a strategic advisor to the business, rather than a hurdle to clear. The platform has unlocked our data, enabling us to benchmark incoming contracts against precedent based on actual data from over 300 unique contracts stored on the platform.”

image description

John Ringwood

Deputy General Counsel, Fir Tree Partners

The Challenge

Fir Tree - NDA Documents_white

Increasingly complex
NDAs and contracts

Fir Tree - Slow_white

Slow turnaround times
from external support

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Too much time spent on
routine legal documents

The Fir Tree legal team found themselves negotiating and managing a growing number of increasingly complex NDAs and vendor contracts as the result of several new product offerings.

Traditionally, the legal team handled routine legal contracting in-house or through global law firms for overflow. Despite paying expensive hourly rates, they found that external support was slow for high-volume, routine legal documents that called for fast and efficient turnaround. Fir Tree wanted to reduce resource burn and leverage data analytics to make better business decisions. The firm sought a software platform and alternative legal service provider that could standardize the contracting process, offer document management capabilities, and own the contract negotiations process so their internal team could focus on higher value work.

The Solution

Fir Tree - Accelerate Contract

Faster NDA
negotiations

Alliance - Contract Data

Access to valuable
contract data

Alliance - Negotiate

Standardized negotiation
practices

Fir Tree partnered with Ontra to streamline legal operations, quickly transitioning the management of NDAs, then vendor contracts, to a fully outsourced platform with a network of highly skilled attorneys.

Fir Tree partnered with Ontra to streamline their legal operations, quickly transitioning the management of NDAs, then vendor contracts, to a fully outsourced platform with a highly skilled network of attorneys. As a result, Fir Tree’s investment team wasn’t bogged down by routine contract negotiations and ultimately maintained high standards across the organization by proving that an outsourcing solution wouldn’t slow down deal flow.

With Ontra, Fir Tree enabled faster NDA negotiations while capturing valuable contract data along the way. The Fir Tree legal team partnered with experienced ex-BigLaw attorneys (now account managers at Ontra) to create custom “scorecards” for NDAs, NRLs, joinders, and vendor contracts to ensure negotiation practices were standardized across the organization. After seeing the success of leveraging Ontra for NDAs, the Fir Tree team transferred ownership of vendor contract negotiation, where Ontra’s document management capabilities are especially useful to the entire organization.

Additionally, Fir Tree enabled automated reporting on the Ontra platform to assist the legal team with maintaining meaningful oversight over the entire contracting process. Fir Tree now has access to instant insights from all contracts and can easily extract key data points and provisions when called upon.

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