I recently interviewed a corporate attorney at Shulman Rogers, a mid-sized law firm in Potomac, MD. Max Masinter told me that Corporate Focus has become “a foundation” of his practice because of its efficiency and client service benefits. In fact, he gave me a few compelling, real-life examples that align closely with what I’ve been hearing from other attorneys for years.
Stock Option Audit: Each year, Shulman Rogers must let the auditors know the numbers of options that have vested by year’s end. Since there are over 100 optionees for this client, the vesting numbers used to take a long time to calculate – and they had to be recalculated based on Dec. 31st. Now, since all of the option vesting data is stored in Corporate Focus and kept up to date, these calculations take only about 5% of the time they took in the past.
Capitalization Answers: Recently, a client asked Max what the effect on the ownership of the company would be if one investor was bought out. In order to answer the question, Max needed to know the current percentage of ownership for each stockholder in the company on a fully-diluted basis and how that would change if the shares were transferred to the company or another investor. Within a few minutes, he was able to generate the capitalization table for all classes and the stock option plan and then make the changes that were necessary to see the effect of the proposed buy-out. According to Max, this task previously would have taken hours – and most likely would have been postponed for a few days. But since the information was readily available in Corporate Focus, he was able to get back to the client later that same day. This rapid-fire response “wowed” the client and saved thousands of dollars of purely administrative legal fees.
Due Diligence Requests: Another client had its information “all over the place” when it first began working with Shulman Rogers. As a result, when this company needed to do the disclosure for their first private placement memorandum, it cost more than $25,000 in legal work to organize its corporate and equity records as required for the securities disclosure document. However, once the information had been neatly organized and scanned into Corporate Focus, the cost to prepare for the next round of financing was less than $5,000 – an 80% savings of both time and money.
In these difficult economic times, clients are looking for every possible way to slash legal fees. The above are great examples of how a system like Corporate Focus can help law firms stay competitive by keeping their fees low and being more responsive than ever to client needs. Those firms that can save their clients money – and deliver an impressive level of service at the same time – will undoubtedly end up having more legal work shifted to their pipeline. And isn’t that everyone’s goal at the end of the day?
To learn more about how Corporate Focus can help with your client service initiatives and provide immediate access to your clients’ transactional information and documents, take a look at the Product Video.
