In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers an online document repository for transactional lawyers, an inexpensive PDF creation tool for Windows, and a suite of PDF utilities for Mac. Don't miss the next issue.
Below you'll find one of the three articles from today's edition:
How to Find a Good Deal Document
By Dennis Kennedy
Large firm transactional lawyers often have the benefit of a handy document bank of prior agreements that they can use when working on a new deal. An agreement similar to what you need can serve as an initial prototype, a checklist for issues, or as a useful way to determine how others treat similar deals.
But even the largest firms don't have every possible document available in house. And what about smaller firms?
Real Practice's RealDealDocs provides access to hundreds of thousands of exhibits from public filings from the SEC EDGAR database selected for relevance to transactional lawyers. Real Practice has categorized these documents and made them searchable using its own technology. As a result, you get access to not only thousands of agreements, but also millions of deal clauses, created by lawyers from the leading law firms in the U.S.
RealDealDocs organizes these materials so you can use simple pull-down menus to find the type of agreements you want. You can search by document or clause, or browse document categories. For document searches, you simply select the type of document and then drill down into sub-types. You can run full-text searches. The search results display of relevant documents with titles, parties, law firms, and other information to help you select a relevant document.
RealDealDocs currently highlights four main topic areas — mergers and acquisitions, securities and corporate finance, labor and employment, and real property and leases, but also provides materials in other practice areas.
You can use RealDealDocs for many other useful purposes than document creation. Documents from other deals make excellent issue checklists, indicate how a party you're negotiating with might have modified standard provisions in the past, and make for an effective parry when opposing counsel tells you that lawyers never change a certain provision.
Real Practice offers a 10-day free trial, with RealDealDocs available in daily ($9.95), weekly ($19.95), and monthly ($29.95 or $39.95) plans. Multiple user plans exist. Learn more about RealDealDocs.
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