Allen & Overy has launched ReportRoom, a collaborative due diligence platform created by Wizdocs, a California-based legal software company, in collaboration with the firm’s own M&A lawyers and legaltech group. A&O is the first firm to globally implement this technology.
ReportRoom is a secure, online platform hosted within A&O’s own IT infrastructure. It enables everyone working on a report to review and edit sections simultaneously and benefit from easy two-way communication between reviewers and coordinators.
“Previously due diligence exercises have been run through templates and shared via email, with the coordinator collating information and reports,” Dirk Meeus, global co-head of A&O’s corporate practice told Legal IT Insider.
“Launching across our global M&A practice, this platform moves this process away from email, automating collation of work across the world, and so making multijurisdictional due diligence easier to coordinate, track and report, wherever coordinators or clients are.”
Meeus added that benefits for A&O lawyers are all about streamlining process, introducing time savings and being able to see instantly what the status of a matter is, including identifying issues more quickly, in real time.
“Many of these benefits are also for clients, who can receive more detailed reports from the team as they need them and in the format of their choosing,” he said. “For coordinators and clients to get a quicker snapshot in real time of what reviewers are seeing on the other side of the world is the most significant benefit.”
A&O first introduced ReportRoom in November 2018 and so it is still fairly early days for the product. The firm is in the process of making adjustments to the platform as ideas come in from users for potential improvements and Meeus anticipates it being used by other practice areas for compiling multi-author reports, not just due diligence.