Global News
iManage, the company dedicated to transforming how professionals work, today announced it has acquired Closing Folders, the market leader in legal transaction management (LTM).
The acquisition uniquely enables iManage to deliver automation and governance over transactions and deal documents from creation to closing.
Transactions make up a large portion of law firm matters and legal department work. The closing processes associated with them are typically manual, error-prone, expensive, and complex. They require the coordination of hundreds of documents, frequent revisions, and numerous signatures and tasks across many parties – often under tight timelines. And clients are frequently frustrated by insufficient visibility into closing status and processes.
Closing Folders automates repetitive, error-prone tasks enabling lawyers to reduce risk and time-to-close while improving accuracy, transparency, and client service. Every month, over 4,000 legal transactions are negotiated, signed, and closed using Closing Folders. These transactions range from small commercial lending deals for local businesses to multi-billion-dollar acquisitions of global companies. Utilizing a workflow designed for the way lawyers run deals, the software easily manages complex transactions electronically, across multiple parties – an increasingly important capability, as many organizations plan for ongoing remote work post-COVID-19.
The rapidly growing company has doubled year-over-year growth in revenue, active users per month, and active deals per month.
Together, iManage and Closing Folders deliver powerful capabilities to ease the burden of document and transaction management from end-to-end. The innovative SaaS offering is intuitive and requires no deployment services – making it both easy to adopt and transformational for law firms and organizations of all sizes. Business and technology advantages of the consolidated company include:
“Closing Folders provides incredible value by significantly reducing the time it takes to complete a transaction. It has made an enormous impact on our closing of hundreds of transactions of all types and sizes,” said Natalie Munroe, Head of Osler Works - Transactional. “We anticipate that Closing Folders’ acquisition by iManage will be a major turning point for legal transaction management, delivering a single platform that combines both document and transaction management. We are thrilled to have worked with and represented Closing Folders on this journey.”
The acquisition will benefit Closing Folders’ clients with accelerated investment in core product development and global support from a single organization capable of delivering Closing Folders worldwide. As Closing Folders is integrated more deeply into the product portfolio, iManage will seek customer input to validate integration plans and future product enhancements. Customers that use or plan to use Closing Folders with non-iManage products will continue to be supported and will benefit from the additional resources iManage brings to Closing Folders.
Closing Folders will operate as a product-specific division of iManage. Co-founders Sahil Zaman, who served as Closing Folders President, and Gordon Cassie, the company’s CTO, will continue to lead day-to-day business and technology direction for iManage Closing Folders.
“From our outset, it’s been our ambition to get Closing Folders on every lawyer’s desktop, having experienced first-hand the onerous, task-laden practice of transactional law,” said Sahil Zaman. “With iManage’s global presence and industry-leading platform, we foresee rapid adoption.”
iManage and Closing Folders have key synergies across technology, culture and customer base, with the majority of existing Closing Folder customers also on the iManage platform.
“We’ve always been intensely focused on enabling our customers to leverage digital technologies to automate and improve business outcomes,” said Neil Araujo, CEO, iManage. “Closing Folders is a strategic addition to our portfolio that has the proven ability to transform transaction-based practices.”
iManage is the leading provider of work product management solutions for legal, accounting and financial services firms and the corporate departments they serve worldwide. Every day iManage helps professionals streamline the creation, sharing, governance and security of their work product. Nearly 3,000 organizations around the world—including more than 1,800 law firms—rely on iManage to help them deliver great client work. Headquartered in Chicago, iManage is a management-owned company.
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