Grillo Higgins | Case Study

Who

- Independent Australian corporate law firm with offices in Melbourne and Perth

- Dispersed team working on M&A and capital markets transactions

- Experienced complexity with buy and sell-side clients opting for a variety of data room platforms

The challenge

Delivering quality diligence on time and budget is critical for the GrilloHiggins team. The firm’s growing client base has seen an increase in deal volume and complexity. GrilloHiggins needed a solution that could scale while supporting a streamlined diligence process, ensuring quality and consistency.

Partners reported a lack of consistency in completing contract reviews and bottlenecks when it came to finalising client reports. Team members couldn’t easily collaborate across Outlook, Word and Excel, which created inefficiency and sometimes caused a last-minute rush to meet client deadlines.  

Transforming DD workflows

With minimal training required and an intuitive interface Deeligence has been rapidly adopted and is now an integral part of GrilloHiggins’ transactional toolkit for all deals, across virtual data rooms, or other document platforms eg. Sharepoint / Google Drive.  

“The learning curve was minimal, with the team up and running after a short 30 minute training session," said Tony Petani, Partner at GrilloHiggins.

Results

Efficiency has been enhanced as there is a now a more efficient document management and review process.

“Deeligence offers a number of great features to support collaboration, real-time progress tracking and easy reporting, to streamline our process, enhance efficiency and improve client service and the quality of our due diligence reports”, said Matthew Bridges, Partner at GrilloHiggins.  

Particularly valuable was Deeligence’s AI Scanner, which helped quickly pull out and summarise relevant sections from commercial contracts. Lawyers liked using the AI Scanner to help identify and summarise relevant provisions.  

“The AI provides a strong starting point, taking you 80% of the way there and freeing up time for more valuable analysis and advice work” said Aidan Nugent, Senior Associate at GrilloHiggins.  

The administrative burden of a typical deal has also decreased. Lawyers focus their attention on high-value legal analysis without the need to spend 30-45 minutes each day wading through a changing data room – saving the team 15+ hours on an average diligence. On a recent transaction with a GoogleDrive, the team were able to use Deeligence to create an index and update it at the click of a button.  

The Deeligence dashboard reduced internal meetings and meant there was no need to follow up team members individually.  

"I really liked seeing how each lawyer was progressing, enabling me to update the partner and client. The process is much easier and more intuitive with Deeligence," shares JiaWen Poh, Senior Associate at GrilloHiggins.  

On one diligence project, Deeligence saved 10+ hours alone by enabling the team to create a list of in-scope documents which was updated live over a multi-week diligence.  

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