Focus on your practice – not busywork.
See how using Lending Assist can save over 8 hours on document preparation and due diligence on every file.
The problem.
Some years ago, a corporate commercial lawyer was having his highest billing year ever but lost one of his best clients for a straightforward reason—being too slow producing the security documents needed to facilitate the business loan transactions he worked on. Paralegals were copying and pasting the same information into multiple documents and had to manually visit government websites to pull the due diligence searches and registrations required for business loan transactions.
There was no centralized platform for his team to keep track of their loans, and scheduling around vacations and time off presented the challenge of another lawyer picking up the file without fully understanding where the file was at in the process. It was also difficult for his team to work remotely during the evening or on weekends when all files and programs were on the physical desktop computers in the office. All of this meant one thing – increased costs and longer wait times for the client. At the same time, lenders were under increasing pressure to deliver superior customer service and improve margins and were looking for an alternative solution to lawyers for getting borrowers their money. The lawyer realized that if he was to remain relevant in the future, he needed to find a way to not only speed up the business loan process but also reduce fees.
Analyzing the problem.
Looking at the needs of his practice, he and the team narrowed the problem down to a few “must-haves” in order for the solution to meet their unique needs.
1. Eliminate copy and pasting in documents
The most critical requirement in a solution was the need to eliminate copy and pasting that added hours to document preparation and resulted in costly mistakes. This not only included information such as contacts and signing dates, but also search data from government registries.
2. Bypass using government registry sites
Another pain point was manually navigating to every government registry and using unintuitive interfaces to search and save results. For some files with hundreds of serial numbered goods, manually entering each serial number could add days to the file’s closing.
3. Customized for commercial transactions
What was not needed was a “cookie-cutter” solution that would need to be modified and patched together with complicated workarounds – what was developed was a program designed to handle the most complex commercial transactions in a simple, easy-to-use application.
4. Cloud-based collaboration
Tired of outdated collaboration methods, the solution needed to allow a team-based approach to legal work, providing all team members with the ability to work on files 24/7 from anywhere they were located. Data also needed to be stored within the application for easy viewing.
Not wanting to reinvent the wheel, there was a search undertaken, and nothing was available to meet the “must-haves” and deliver value above the cost of the software. Available software would have to be patched together with complicated workarounds, and even then, generic document preparation systems could not complete the most complex files or provide the majority of features identified. The only way forward would be to the development of a commercial program from the ground up.
Lending Assist – the custom solution.
Working as subject matter experts in close connection with a technical team was critical in understanding the complicated requirements of the problem. The development team completed a deep analysis of the workflows and processes of these loan transactions and began to develop the program customized for commercial lending, with quality assurance practices to ensure that no detail went overlooked and that the program was developed to meet every need identified. There was also a review of hundreds of legal documents from financial institutions and developed a set of general precedents for Lending Assist to ensure that the program was generating all documents with accuracy, complete with all information and data pulled from searches.
Results.
files through the Lending Assist system
hour reduction in due diligence preparation
%
reduction in fees charged to clients
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Let’s get your team the same results!