The Tech You Need to Reduce Your Legal Bills
This may come as a shock to you….but I’m going to say it anyway. You’re overpaying your attorney.
I’ll let you absorb that for a moment. You okay?
If you’re like most CEOs and CFOs, you like your attorney a great deal and you hate opening up their invoices. You know you need them to reduce risk in your organization, and you also know that you are spending a small fortune in counsel and legal transactional work. You know it, they know it, we all know it.
Now here’s something you might not know. There is work your law firm is doing for your business — right now– that they really don’t need to do. And they’re billing you hundreds of dollars an hour for it.
Before you get puffed up and pick up the phone, consider that your attorney might not even know they don’t have to do this work and bill for it. They may have been trained in the ways of the BTLF (Big Traditional Law Firm). In fact, they might be delighted to be let in on the secret. And guess what? It’s not really a secret. It’s something that EVERY OTHER INDUSTRY has figured out, but for some reason has largely evaded the legal industry.
Are you ready for this? The word of the day is technology.
That’s right, tech has done wonders to improve productivity and streamline efficiencies across every industry from manufacturing to finance to healthcare. There are tools available for businesses that take much of the manual work attorneys do, and automate it. In fact, some attorneys, like the Auxana GCs, have discovered this tech and make a point to introduce it and/or implement it with clients. It’s a decision that benefits our clients greatly, in the form of reduced legal costs, and it frees up our GCs to do what they do best: help their clients businesses’ run smoother and more profitably. Here’s our list of the top tech that can drastically reduce your legal costs.
Equity Management Systems
Law firms spend a lot of time manually managing their clients equity program, and they don’t need to. Even when that work is delegated to paralegals, it still doesn’t have to be a manual task. Tools like Carta, manage your equity programs for you. From cap tables to option pools to 409A valuations, everything that your law firm does using humans and spreadsheets can now be managed intelligently and for a fraction of the price. And if you have an Outsourced GC, they can make sure the data is kept up to date for you, so it’s current when you need it and out of your hair when you don’t.
Contract & Document Management
The pain of managing contracts is real. Contract and document management tools (a favorite is PandaDoc) take the pain out of organizing, updating, reviewing, and signing documents. Most businesses keep all of their contracts in a Dropbox folder which is a hot mess (you know it’s a hot mess), and run into issues like version control and flat out losing docs. We like our clients to use a contract management system to bring order to that chaos.
Look, you shouldn’t be paying $400 an hour (or more) to have someone keep your documents up to date and organized. Maybe a few hundred dollars a month — tops.
Our clients have seen their legal bills decrease thousands of dollars per year when they embrace these kinds of technologies. That’s why we bring this kind of automation to our practice at Auxana, because it’s good for our clients.