Challenge: A quest to maximize internal counsel’s impact

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 negotiation process so their internal team could focus on higher-value work.

Solution: Fir Tree slashes contract negotiation time while maintaining high standard of quality

Fir Tree partnered with Ontra to streamline its 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.