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Professionals and Digital Technologies: Times are changing
March 2019

PROFESSIONALS AND DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES: TIMES are CHANGING!

Last January at Multipartner Virtual Data Room we held one of the video training sessions that we always organize with our new clients.

The session was with a prestigious legal firm to speak about functionalities, advantages, security and speed of our VDR designed for the Legal Sector. This gave us the opportunity to reflect on the evolution – in our personal experience - of the legal sector and, in general, of the professional companies and their relationship with the new digital technologies. We would like to share here the results of those reflections. We believe in sharing what we were born for: know-how and expertise on the VDR application in different working contexts. Given that Multipartner was one of the first VDR providers in Italy, we naturally keep an eye on the fast-paced growth of digital transformation, appreciating the changes taking place in every sector of our market activity.

Our greater goal is to make the advanced service of VDRs

Our greater goal is to make the advanced service of VDRs as widespread as possible, making working life easier for everyone.
Whatever your choice of the VDR provider you will work with, we wouldn’t like anyone feel left behind. We believe that our VDR goes hand in hand with the competence of our customers. This also applies to us here at Multipartner, because we would not be able to sell VDRs if we only knew the features of our products without considering the business of our customers.

As an experienced VDR provider with also significant competence in the consulting sector, we have helped legal and consulting companies keeping updated on digital technologies to improve their daily work for years. Furthermore, no IT expertise is needed to use our VDR.

 In the past ...

A few years ago, the legal sector seemed to be one of the most conservative areas among professionals. Our legal clients used to ask for VDRs mainly on behalf of their clients, due to due diligence or M&A operations, disputes, arbitrations etc. Their goal was only to accelerate and protect their customers' deals as much as possible, and a VDR is ideal to ensure greater effectiveness, data protection, speed and proper organization of all uploaded documentation.

Legal Firms used to ask Multipartner for its dedicated VDR mainly on behalf of their customers for:

  • M&A
  • Arbitrations
  • Bankruptcy
  • Disputes
  • Litigations
  • Corporate
  • Fundraising
  • Strategic Partnerships

At that time, we used to try suggesting our legal clients the use of a VDR at their law firms, but the feedback wasn’t so positive.
They seemed to be suspicious about digital technologies supporting their daily activities, as if technologies could threaten their working routine or replace their specific skills, or rather as if they didn’t need this advanced, full-featured digital tool to improve their work. Thanks to our consulting experience, we are perfectly aware that nothing can replace the ability of professionals to manage deals correctly.

From due diligence to litigations, from M&A to bankruptcy and arbitrations, our VDR’s technology is at disposal of the competence and the professionalism of the customers who request it.

Nowadays:

Our clients belonging to the legal and the advisory sectors - and not only ours- are well aware of this now, and they widely use our modular legal VDRs internally, for their own activities as well.

Going back to our video training session with the law firm, it went in a completely different way compared to what used to happen in the past. For us it was a further confirmation that times are changing, and for the better.

Our client on the other side of the video was extremely responsive and asked many questions about all the features specifically designed for the legal sector VDR. Their curiosity came not only with the aim of proposing it to some customers who had to be engaged in a complex due diligence in the coming days: they were also evaluating a VDR for their internal use. At that point, our prompt client support team quickly switched from a general training session to a VDR demo to show them how and why our platform can support concrete daily work at law and advisory firms.

The features we presented include: the ability to go paperless in a blink of an eye by optimizing results and reducing time for the submission of procedural documents; the automatic versioning of the uploaded files with related notifications that reach each authorized user; full text advanced research; the possibility to work on many pdf documents at the same time; the bulk upload of entire tree structures and the security features, of which we are extremely proud.
Even the lawyers knew of the importance of maintaining high levels of security and protection of documents and data, so we showed them how our granular permissions based on specific roles for users work.

Our Team has deepened our already extremely high control standards on documents, accesses and data, explaining in detail how our VDR can keep track of every user actions. The customer was rather intrigued by this latest information, perhaps because this showed how our VDR is organized to support also Information System Audits.

The follow-up. Even if we have our Help Desk and Client Support teams always available for clients and for VDR users’ needs, we use to ask our new clients a feedback after about 2 months of intensive usage of our VDR. Below are our legal client’s comments as we received them.

They say they’ve got big advantages:

Ability to manage all clients’ instances more quickly through the VDR ‘s advanced research criteria.
The documentation in the VDR is already organized and ready for consultation.
Saving money and resources.
Folders, contracts, files and data are protected and secure.
Ability to share more easily communications with clients and other colleagues in total security with just one centralized repository.

They say they don’t fear anymore:

- Breaches of confidential information.
Waste of time performing long manual procedures.
Risk of critical human errors.
Demanding clients who need to work 24/7/365 from any part of the world.
Loss of confidential documents.
Corrupted and unusable files (it can happen if files are old).

 

The Future

This very positive feedback increased our enthusiasm. We can’t reveal the name of our client, as we are bound to them by a strict confidentiality agreement, but we will be happy if the info we shared here will be helpful even to just one of the readers. We believe in the next future there will be no need to raise awareness on the use of VDRs in different working contexts, because we hope it will be taken as granted.

Anyway, we will be here to share with you the next evolutions of business and VDR, the way we will experience it.

Sabrina Girardi

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