Executive Summary
Dechert’s Global Finance team constantly needs to produce large numbers of contracts on tight timelines for their matters. Not only does this take time for junior associates and paralegals to produce, but more senior lawyers would spend hours painstakingly reviewing each redline to guarantee accuracy. Document automation doesn’t help because their contracts are bespoke and change constantly throughout the matter. With Office & Dragons, associates and paralegals dramatically increased the speed with which they create, revise and review these contracts without advance planning or coding any templates, ensuring they always meet client timelines and freeing bandwidth to focus on high-value legal work.
Case Study
Challenge: Dechert’s Global Finance team assists financial sector clients on important matters and complex issues. A leader in the field, the team is always looking to innovate its strategies and processes. A constant factor is the need to produce large numbers of contracts on tight timelines for each transaction. Not only does this take time for junior associates and paralegals to produce, but more senior lawyers would spend hours painstakingly reviewing each redline to guarantee accuracy. Then, when a deal term inevitably changed last minute, or a hard-to-spot error was caught in the documents, it would put the deadline at risk as they would have to repeat the process with every document.
Finding a solution: Although Dechert already had document automation tools, they weren’t a fit for the team’s challenge. The documents the team needed to produce were bespoke to each transaction, had to be completed on very tight timelines and changed constantly throughout the transaction.There simply wasn’t enough time, and the work was too bespoke, for the document automation team to code templates for each matter. Once the Global Finance team saw Office & Dragons and realized that it was simple enough for associates and paralegals to use by themselves (and worked with any document without requiring time spent coding templates), they decided to run a trial.
Early in the trial, a pair of associates faced the arduous task of spinning out 350 mortgage documents over the weekend. Luckily, they were introduced to Office & Dragons on Friday and won their weekend back.The following week, on closing day, they were tasked with making an update to all of the mortgage documents – with O&D, that was dealt with in less than an hour, and they closed on time. Elated with the results, they quickly got their whole team on board.
Results:
Office & Dragon is now a standard part of the Global Finance team’s practice. Here’s what a few of them had to say on the difference it’s made:
“We are constantly guiding our clients through transformative deals. The last thing our clients want to hear is that the timeline on a deal needs to be adjusted because we cannot update documents in time. Office & Dragons helps us meet that challenge and allows our attorneys to focus on high-value legal work.”
“I was looking at spending an entire weekend on the arduous task of spinning out 350 mortgage documents. There simply wasn’t enough time, and the work was too unique, for the document automation team to code templates for each matter. Fortunately,I was introduced to Office & Dragons on Friday and won my weekend back.”
“The software did save my life a few times! Not long after I started as a first year, I got this last-minute weekend assignment to revise 45+mortgage deeds for a deal that died in 2019 and suddenly decided to revive and close in three days. The revisions were not just party names/dates, there were some substantive tweaks, and the worst part was the docs weren’t all structured the same way. But thanks to O&D, I ended up only taking about 10 hours to finish the whole project and got my Sunday back! The mid-level was very impressed too.”