When it comes to finding precedent deal data and what’s market, transactional lawyers are frustrated.
It often takes in excess of 6-8 hours to find a precedent deal and identify relevant deal points from firm documents. And, even then, lawyers may not feel they are getting a complete picture of the data.
Now multiply these hours exponentially when all recent precedent deal points are needed as a reference for drafting and negotiation.
For many lawyers, the process is further frustrated by the number of steps — and people — required for manual deal data extraction.
When a new deal comes in, or a client is in immediate need of critical information, lawyers start the hunt. Often, details can’t be found quickly, and others are engaged. An urgent email goes out looking for help.
From accounting to knowledge management to business development, professionals across the firm drop everything to help with the search. Other priorities are put on hold as the team scrambles to assemble the information, often from various sources, all while the client waits. The team puts together the best information they can find and hopes it will be enough.
Regardless of the outcome, this is not an ideal process.
Enter Litera’s new solution for transactional lawyers and knowledge management teams: Foundation Insights.
This easy-to-use platform helps lawyers instantly answer complex questions by using GenAI to extract deal points from firm deal documents and pairing it with matter experience data to quickly and accurately get you the answers you need, when you need them.
That 6-8 hours it can take an associate to pull deal points from just one deal? It’s now cut down to minutes.
Furthermore, all of your firm’s deals are in one searchable place, so finding the most relevant precedent deals and their deal points for comparison is simple for any attorney to find — no staff needed.
The tool verifies data with minimal human input, ensuring the highest standard of accuracy while still being simple and intuitive.
Getting Started
Lawyers typically lack the time to learn a complex new system, and ease of onboarding is a key goal for any legal technology tool.
Foundation Insights is intuitive and easy to use.
When a deal closes, simply upload the closing documents to Insights, select the appropriate deal type and Insights will extract and load the deal data from the documents into the system quickly and easily.
To help get a new system off the ground, Litera also offers a service to pre-populate Foundation Insights with all of a firm’s historical data.
Contrast this process with that of many law firms, which collect experience data by circulating a blank survey form to a transaction team.
The latter approach requires lawyers’ time and effort to fill a blank page — and often achieves mixed results in collecting usable data.
With Foundation Insights, the system will automatically extract nearly 300 deal points for an M&A transaction within minutes of a document upload, and the commercial real estate acquisition version of Foundation Insights extracting over 90 deal points. Foundation Insights now supports several new document types, including commercial real estate leases, credit agreements, limited partnership agreements, and NDAs, with plans to introduce more in the coming year.
The system then delivers a populated dashboard of all the deal points that have been extracted.
Instead of a blank survey, a transaction team receives a pre-existing draft. They only need to verify the accuracy of the deal point, and the process for doing so is intuitive.
A click on a deal point value automatically brings up the relevant portion of the underlying document. With one click of the button, the deal point can then be marked “verified” in the system or, on rare occasions, edited to the correct figure.
This creates a workflow where, after the closing of a deal, an attorney who worked on the matter can verify all of the deal points in a matter of minutes.
The extracted deal points will then be accessible to all lawyers, be included in aggregate metrics, and be available for marketing and business development efforts. Foundation Insights has become even more impactful when combined with Litera’s experience management solution, Foundation, as it allows you to push the extracted deal data over to Foundation’s matter profiles. This means firms can reap the benefits of automatically populating enhanced deal profiles in Foundation with minimal effort.
Accessing Your Insights
Once your deals have been uploaded into the system, your users can put the data to work through an efficient, user-friendly interface that displays all of the metrics that have been collected.
One view, called “market,” contains all of the deal points as aggregate metrics, based on every deal the firm has uploaded.
The resulting dashboard allows you to instantly answer the question of “what’s market?” for any of the deal points the system collects.
Looking for insights based on a specific matter or group of matters? A few clicks narrow the data points down to that subset.
Each deal point here represents the type of data that would often have to be found by having a knowledgeable professional comb a 200-page document for hours on end.
A group of up to five deals can be compared, and the data can be directly exported to Excel.
The simplicity of the design is particularly helpful when comparing deals.
Here, all of the deal points being compared are laid out right next to each other for easy visualization.
From document upload to data visualization, Foundation Insights provides a simple, intuitive process that requires minimal onboarding while delivering impactful insights that save lawyers time and a client billable hours.
Putting Data to Work
For the legal industry, manually curating data from transactions has long been a time-consuming task requiring skilled practitioners and delivering mixed results.
Some firms have devoted decades to creating a bespoke, reasonably efficient process. These firms have distinct advantages in accessing data-driven insights from precedential deals when negotiating transactions and advising their clients.
Firms that lack such a system often rely on “reply all” emails and firmwide fire drills instead — a process that needlessly consumes resources and delivers inferior results.
As Foundation Insights shows, this is a situation that can be effectively addressed by generative AI.
Foundation Insights offers elite data tracking and reporting to all transactional lawyers — with only minimal effort on the lawyers’ part to get it up and running. Insights gives lawyers the ability to negotiate from a position of strength and deliver unparalleled client outcomes.
