Fir Tree Partners Cuts Negotiation Time in Half With Ontra’s Contract Automation

Challenge

Firm seeks to improve efficiency and data management for routine contracts

After Fir Tree Partners launched several new product offerings, legal team members found themselves spending more and more time negotiating and managing a growing number of increasingly complex NDAs and vendor contracts.

Traditionally, the firm’s legal team handled routine legal contracting internally and used global law firms to help with overflow. Because the burden on the in-house team was too high to be sustainable, the firm paid expensive hourly rates for outside counsel. Even then, Fir Tree found the external support was too slow for high-volume, routine legal documents that called for fast and efficient turnaround.

The need to reduce resource burn and increase speed – coupled with the desire to leverage data analytics to make better business decisions – led Fir Tree to determine that an alternative legal service provider with a software platform would be the best fit.

Solution

Contract Automation accelerates contract review and centralizes data storage

Contract Automation offered a suitable solution that could standardize the firm’s contracting process, offer document management capabilities, and own the negotiation process. For these reasons, Fir Tree decided to partner with Ontra to streamline its legal operations.

Ontra’s team helped the firm create custom scorecards for its NDAs, non-reliance letters, joinders, and vendor contracts to make sure negotiation practices were standardized across the organization. After successfully leveraging Ontra’s Contract Automation for NDAs, the Fir Tree team also expanded its use for vendor contract negotiation.

Results

Improving operations, reducing costs, and speeding up time-to-investment

Partnering with Ontra helped Fir Tree’s legal and investment teams reduce the burden of routine NDA and vendor contract negotiations. Said Deputy General Counsel John Ringwood, “We’ve saved an extraordinary amount of time and resources. Our team can now focus on higher value work and strategic initiatives.” Contract Automation maintained the firm’s high standards for contract review while speeding up the deal workflow. The increased efficiency helped other teams see the legal department “as a strategic advisor to the business rather than a hurdle to clear,” according to Ringwood.

Additionally, Contract Automation’s AI-enabled platform automatically captured and centralized valuable contract data without slowing the deal process down. As a result, Fir Tree’s teams gained access to instant insights from all of their NDAs and vendor contracts so they could easily extract key data points and provisions when called upon. Ringwood explained the benefits: “The platform has unlocked our data, enabling us to benchmark incoming contracts against precedents based on actual data from over 300 unique contracts stored on the platform.”

Because Fir Tree enabled automated reporting, its legal team maintained meaningful oversight over the entire contracting process with minimal effort. All told, partnering with Ontra helped the firm improve legal operations, reduce costs, speed up time-to-investment, and grow the business.

Published January 6, 2022