DiliTrust: Powerful Legal Entity Management

Two years ago when I started in my current role, we were struggling with two important pain points: managing invoices from a slew of legal vendors and keeping track of legal entities and related compliance tasks. As I discussed in this post, we decided to tackle e-billing first because invoices were literally overflowing our GC's inbox and we had no visibility into our legal spend. Just getting a ballpark number for total legal spend was a serious exercise and there was no detailed data breaking down legal spend into useful metrics. In deciding what system to implement first, I wisely took the advice of a paralegal who had been there a lot longer than I had. In her mind, there was no doubt, our journey would begin with E-billing software.

Being new at the company and still learning about how its legal team operated, I was thrilled to take insight from someone who had been with the company for years and was so clear about where our tech adoption journey should being. At the time, I only rarely engaged with external counsel so implementing an e-billing solution wouldn't help my day-to-day but that was besides the point. My objective was to make our team function better and this was certainly an area where we needed help. The other thing about e-billing software that made it a good first choice, was that I knew exactly what product I wanted to implement: Brightflag.

At the time, I was looking at both e-billing software and legal entity management software. While Brightflag stood out to me as a product that clearly distinguished itself, I found that choosing a legal entity management software to be significantly more challenging. To begin with, it felt like a really crowded space and that the different solutions seemed to all do slightly different things. What made this even more challenging is that I didn't have a good feel for exactly what problem I wanted to solve. I knew we were completely disorganized from a compliance aspect, but i wasn't sure exactly what features we needed in a solution.

I remember looking at Athennian and Minutebox and thinking that a solution that would help us draft resolutions and maintain corporate compliance might makes sense. But as i began to understand my organization a bit better, I came to realize that it wasn't formalistic or rules based and was likely never going to get there. I could see how these two solutions might be incredibly helpful in a more regulated environment, but this was miles from our world where resolutions were more of an afterthought.

What we needed was a powerful lightweight tool to track entities, their interrelationships, associated data and certain compliance related tasks. We also needed a tool that different departments in our organization could have access to thereby alleviating the reliance on legal to provide answers to basic questions about our corporate structure. At the time we were looking for a solution, we were literally being inundated with requests from multiple departments that were much larger than the legal team. We needed a platform were they could self-serve information to free-up the legal team's time so we could focus on our priorities. The absence of such a system was creating pain across the organisation, but it was most concentrated in our finance team who was constantly requesting information from us and frustrated by the delays associated with the process.

Interestingly, while I clearly saw the need for legal entity management software and understood the impact that it would have on the wider organization, other team members didn't see it including our GC. I was still new at the company and still learning about its legal structure, and adapting to a company culture that was radically different from my previous employer. And here I was, trying to pitch the benefits of legal entity management software to my GC who I'm sure, at times, thought I was a bit unhinged to be pushing so hard for this type of solution. The internal sales cycle was easily over a year long. There were of course budget concerns, but I think what really held us back was an inability to clearly see how not having a solution was impacting our paralegals who were constantly fielding requests from other departments for information and the collective frustration of those other departments at having to rely on an understaffed legal department to provide basic legal entity information and organizational charts. Also, holding us back was my inability to pick a solution. I wanted to demo all the systems and build internal consensus on which one we should adopt while in reality I'm not sure the rest of the department cared that much and were just looking for me to make a decision.

After taking a close look at easily half a dozen systems, two started to emerge as frontrunners: Diligent and DiliTrust. Both solutions seemed to have a similar featureset and it finally came down to a cost analysis. I think if the price had been the same, I probably would have gone with Diligent. My only reservation with Diligent, is that it appeared to have an intricate workflow for adding and deleting entities which I suspected might have proved too elaborate for our organization. But there was a significant difference in price which ultimately pushed us to sign with DiliTrust.

One of our concerns as an organization, was making sure the solution would scale as our company's headcount was increasing quickly. For this reason, I negotiated hard on the number of users included in the quote. The number of admin users wasn't enormous which was fine, as I anticipated the management of the system would fall on our legal team. But when it came to view only users, I wanted the flexibility to grant access to whomever inside our organization wanted access without worrying about additional costs. DiliTrust was able to accommodate us on this concern, and we signed a 3 year deal.

Even though our legal entity data was completely scattered, we were able to build out our organizational structure in DiliTrust, which at the time consisted of approximately a 100 entities, in a couple of weeks. The platform is logical and intuitive which made the rollout really quick. Of course, we had been waiting to get a solution for almost a year, so we didn't waste any time getting started.

We were well supported by the DiliTrust team, but sometimes I felt like we were figuring out the best way to do things by ourselves with less guidance from Dilitrust than I would have expected. I'm not sure whether it was the the resource we were working with, but I felt that when we asked questions about the best way to do something or why a feature was implemented in a certain way, we didn't always get a straightforward answer. While I wouldn't say that this impeded us in any way it was a little surprising.

Honestly, we implemented the system and I rarely think about it anymore. It's just working and doing what it's supposed to do - organizing and grouping legal entity data and acting as a source of truth for the organization. It's a huge step up from the mess of excel sheets that used to hold the secrets to our legal entity structure and we are thankfully no longer drawing org charts by hand. Being able to provide access to the system to key members from different departments in our organization has resulted in people self-serving information from the system instead of relying on the legal team to provide data which has freed up our time considerably.

Despite our enthusiasm for leveraging DiliTrust to its fullest potential, we encountered a lack of willingness on Dilitrust's part to act on the feedback we provided. Simple suggestions for improvements—such as the flexibility to add a new line in text fields associated with a legal entities and the capability to associate multiple addresses with a legal entity—remain unaddressed, reflecting a missed opportunity for DiliTrust to improve its offering.

Integrating DiliTrust's Legal Entities module into our operational ecosystem has significantly improved our internal workflows, bringing about a level of efficiency and clarity that was previously unattainable. The transformation has been particularly evident in several key areas of our legal operations, offering a glimpse into the practical benefits of this technological shift.

• Rapid Response to KYC Requests: One of the most remarkable improvements has been in our ability to respond to Know Your Customer (KYC) requests. What once was a time-consuming process, fraught with delays and inefficiencies, can now be completed in a matter of minutes. This acceleration is primarily due to the centralized repository of entity data that DiliTrust provides, enabling quick access to accurate and up-to-date information required for KYC compliance.
• Streamlined Creation of Legal Entity Diagrams: The challenge of creating legal entity diagrams—a crucial task for understanding the structure and relationships between entities within our organization—has been significantly eased. DiliTrust's intuitive interface and robust data management capabilities have empowered our team to generate these diagrams effortlessly, eliminating the frustration that once accompanied this task. This capability not only aids in internal analyses but also enhances our communication with external stakeholders by providing clear and comprehensive visuals of our corporate structure.
• Effortless Access to Legal Entity Profiles: Accessing legal entity profiles has become a breeze, thanks to DiliTrust's streamlined data management system. The platform allows for quick retrieval of detailed profiles, including entity-specific documents, compliance status, and historical data. This ease of access supports better decision-making and enables our team to stay informed about each entity's status without navigating through cumbersome databases or dealing with outdated information.
• Transparent Tracking of Compliance-Related Activities: Perhaps one of the most impactful changes has been the transparency and straightforwardness in tracking compliance-related activities. DiliTrust has introduced a level of visibility that ensures all users, from legal professionals to finance and tax teams, can monitor compliance tasks and deadlines effectively. This feature has fostered a proactive approach to compliance, minimizing risks and ensuring that our organization remains aligned with regulatory requirements across jurisdictions.

The introduction of DiliTrust's Legal Entities module into our workflow has not only addressed the initial pain points we faced in managing legal entities but also transformed our internal processes for the better. What's more difficult to measure is how the improvement in our organizations collective understanding of our structure has impacted the way we make decisions and operate as an organization.