A year ago, the document technology company Litera made a major move into the area of deal-management technology with the acquisitions of two of the leading platforms within a month of each other, first acquiring Workshare Transact in July and then Doxly in August, out of which it created a single product, Litera Transact.
Now, Litera has scored a notable win for the cloud-based platform with news that one of Europe’s largest banks, Nordea, has approved Litera Transact for use throughout its organization, after initially being introduced to the platform through one of its outside law firms, the Norwegian firm Arntzen de Besche.
One legal team within Nordea is using Litera Transact exclusively to digitally manage commercial finance transactions, and the bank has whitelisted the platform for use throughout its organization and is encouraging its adoption for all the bank’s deals.
“Litera Transact is a huge step forward in digitalizing the loan documentation process and [is] instrumental to drive down cost, improve efficiency, and increase speed,” Lars Bjørn Christiansen, head of corporate advisory at Nordea, said in a statement. “… We are encouraging the use of Litera Transact to promote more efficiency across all of our deals.”
In May, I reported here that Dentons, the world’s largest law firm, said that its U.S. real estate practice would exclusively use Litera Transact to manage complex financing and lending deals for one of the largest bank-based financial services companies in the U.S.
Litera’s CEO Avaneesh Marwaha told me that the Nordea and Dentons announcements are significant because they underscore the breadth of deals that can be facilitated through a platform such as Litera Transact.
“We keep finding that lawyers and clients want to narrowly define transaction management as just M&A,” he said. “I want to redefine the market by redefining ‘transaction management.”
Marwaha said that he considers transaction management technology helpful in virtually any scenario in which two parties are engaged in a deal, and especially where collaboration and cost savings are important considerations. That encompasses not just M&As, but also real estate, banking, finance, fundraising and more.
Arntzen de Besche first started using Litera Transact as a way of improving its transaction workflows, particularly around such tasks as creating and updating checklists and generating closing binders. It was through the firm that Nordea was exposed to the platform.
Litera has published a case study that provides details on the firm’s adoption and use of the platform and its introduction to Nordea.
[Disclosure: I host a weekly legal affairs show on Litera.TV for which I am paid by Litera as a contributor.]
