Corporate governance is one of the most crucial aspects of corporate law, with entity ownership and corporate structure having serious implications on taxation, regulatory matters, and more. Unfortunately, though, it can also be one of the most time-consuming aspects of corporate law.
The global entity management experts at Diligent are changing all that. With two sophisticated tools created for the legal industry – Diligent Entities and EquityEffect – Diligent makes it easy for lawyers to manage entity and subsidiary information for even the largest companies across the globe. Diligent Entities makes it easy to keep tabs on entity organization, with comprehensive books and records and corporate structure information stored in one easily accessible place. EquityEffect allows you to manage cap tables through streamlined software that puts an entity’s legal vitals relating to share ownership and valuation at your fingertips.
Efficiently managing corporate records and equity without writing off tons of hours used to seem like an impossibility. Diligent has made the impossible possible, empowering attorneys to do more with less and demonstrate extra value to their clients in the process. Diligent helps your law firm centralize, manage, and effectively structure your client’s cap tables and corporate record in order to deliver a personalized customer experience with better information, at scale. With Diligent Entities and EquityEffect, you can achieve better entity management in a fraction of the time.
Diligent Entities – Who Does the Company Own?
The first part of Diligent’s corporate governance offering is Diligent Entities, which essentially functions as a digitized corporate record. The tool is a centralized, web-based place that houses the vital information for companies that you manage.
Company information that was previously scattered now lives in one place – addresses, who’s on the board, all the minute book documents, and all the decisions you’ve made throughout the course of managing an entity. From the main page, you can click into a single entity record to drill down on a specific company.
On any given entity page, you’ll see company vitals like its name, tax ID, the company type, where it’s incorporated, and any other custom fields relevant to your specific organizational needs, such as internal tracking information.
For every entity, you can store basic corporate documents, like articles of association, board resolutions, or other matters of corporate record, for easy access whenever you need to provide them to regulators or respond to lawsuits.
One of the most important – and most time-consuming – aspects of tracking entity relationships is ascertaining corporate structure. This is particularly true when you’re dealing with a massive organization with hundreds of subsidiaries. To ease the pain of what once took hours and hours of work, Diligent Entities is rolling out a new org charting tool that will exist right within the system. With this tool, you can quickly and easily generate ownership structure from the information that already resides in Diligent Entities.
The result is a clean visualization of organization structure and ownership. These easily accessible charts will have huge implications for global taxation issues and for satisfying KYC obligations, among other things. By the end of the year, they’ll also be offering a document assembly tool which will provide templates for creating regular corporate documents and filings, automating a process that typically takes days to complete.
Entity management was once a burdensome and largely administrative task. With Diligent Entities, it’s an intuitive and customizable process that eliminates hours of work and allows both law firms and corporate legal departments to do more with less.
EquityEffect – Who Owns the Company?
The other half of Diligent’s corporate governance offering is EquityEffect. Cap tables are critical to understanding a company’s ownership and equity distribution among limited partners, employee shareholders, and other investors. Companies pay anywhere from $6,000 to $20,000 a year for cap table management software that offers limited functionality. Law firms that try to manage cap tables for those companies typically employ several disparate processes that waste time.
EquityEffect allows law firms to manage all their client cap tables in a single place, with one login for all lawyers, paralegals, and staff. From a main dashboard, the firm can see a list of all the companies they represent and easily navigate through a long list via a search box.
Clicking on any company takes you directly into their cap tables, so you can immediately see high-level ownership and value information.
EquityEffect is designed with legal teams in mind with an emphasis on ease of use, making it stand out from standard cap table management solutions. While it can typically take a law firm partner two hours to gather the information necessary construct a waterfall analysis for a client, with the complete cap tables already in EquityEffect, the analysis can be done in a matter of seconds. Simply enter an exit amount and an exit date, and you have a full waterfall analysis available for any client.
You can run these analyses as often as you want, with whatever exit dates or total proceeds you desire, to compare different scenarios. For example, if a client is contemplating raising capital for future equity rounds, an attorney can go into EquityEffect, create a fictional round, include it in a particular scenario (you can create an unlimited number of scenarios), and provide your client or shareholders with total transparency into how the cap table would look after each potential scenario.
When it comes to time and efficiency, there’s no better way to provide this valuable advice to your clients. You can create fictional rounds in seconds, with tailored parameters and documents attached, and run as many side-by-side comparisons as it takes to get your client to the answer they need.
Robust reporting features allow you to immediately report out summary cap tables with formulas, stockholder lists, single shareholder reports, and more with just a click. You can even give your clients the ability to run reports themselves if you prefer. Document storage, automated accounting tools that generate 409A reports in under 10 minutes, and the ability to tailor system permissions round out the picture, making EquityEffect the only cap table management platform you’ll ever need.
EquityEffect not only rolls all clients up into a single interface, it also lets law firms offer their clients access to the software. EquityEffect typically costs just 10-20% of the retail price that clients pay for less powerful software on the open market. Providing access to EquityEffect is a valuable service that will set you apart from your competitors.
Simply put, EquityEffect gives law firms a streamlined way to offer both institutional-level intelligence and demonstrable value at a time when clients are particularly sensitive to wasted hours and high legal bills. By enhancing your corporate secretarial and cap table service offerings with technology-enabled professional services, you can further differentiate your organization from the competition and increase new customer acquisition.
Better Corporate Governance at Your Fingertips
In today’s competitive legal market, the pressure is always on to provide increased efficiencies at lower cost. In the realm of entity management, Diligent makes it possible. Streamlining the process of managing cap tables, entities, and their regulatory needs without compromising security gives legal specialists the ability to do more with less, leading to better operational efficiency and improvements in your law firm’s bottom line.
Whether it’s information on who owns an entity or what companies that entity owns, Diligent has essentially taken mountains of information that used to reside in file cabinets and placed it in a centralized place that can be immediately and efficiently accessed through Diligent Entities or EquityEffect. Stop writing off wasted hours and start demonstrating value to your clients by letting Diligent handle your entity management.