Top 10 Am Law firm Ropes & Gray today (26 June) announced that it has selected AI-powered asset management tool ProVision from London-founded startup Intelligent Legal Solutions.
Founded in November 2022, ProVision helps asset management and private fund teams to manage the multiple individual investor terms that go alongside central partnership agreements.
Every fund has a general limited partner agreement but the agreements that govern the specific terms with investors are called side letters, and represent a contract between the fund and that investor. The problems that can arise are twofold. First, there can be hundreds of different agreements with investors that lawyers have to stay on top of and be able to recall in order to drive consistency for future investors. Second, under what is called the ‘most favoured nation’ (MFN) principle, investors that commit more money are automatically entitled to the favourable terms afforded to smaller investors, with all the complexity that entails.
Normally a manual and often error-prone process, ProVision automatically generates specific investor forms and collates the responses, saving a huge amount of time.
“Rather than waiting for solutions to emerge, Ropes & Gray took an active role in sourcing ILS as a best-in-class partner and then working with ILS to develop the ProVision tool,” the firm said today. One evolution of the product was for ILS to develop the ability to work with PDFs, not just Word documents, as side letters are usually in PDF format.
“By collaborating closely with the team at ILS, we helped develop ProVision to automate the extraction and comparison of side letter terms from multiple side letters for purposes of facilitating investor elections and ongoing compliance elections,” said Melissa Bender, co-lead of the private funds group. “ProVision has been a game-changer for our private funds group, fundamentally reinventing how we manage the side letter process. The tool streamlines tasks that were previously time-consuming and labor-intensive, allowing our attorneys to focus on higher-value work.”
ILS have five major law firm clients, with four more about to start pilots. The founding team is Stefano Benigni, CEO; Fergus Plant, head of product; and Jack McCarthy, head of growth, seen here at LegalTechTalk.
Plant and McCarthy were previously lawyers at Goodwin, while Benigni was a software engineer and has a PhD from Imperial College London.
Historically Ropes & Gray has been very private about the legaltech work it is engaged with but it was recently revealed to be one of the firms working with Harvey on its Workflow Builder tool. This announcement marks, in this publication’s opinion, a welcome shift.