Firmex’s Deal Room™ is my company’s “private-label” virtual data room technology being used by transactional lawyers to conduct commercial transactions or “deals”. Deals are corporate divestments, acquisitions, equity and debt issues, restructurings and bankruptcy filings, joint ventures and so on.

Many of these deals involve thousands of diligence documents containing hundreds of thousands of pages of information to be reviewed. This is followed by hundreds of “agreement” documents or transactional drafts that go through numerous iterations. It is not uncommon to have anywhere from thirty to three hundred people in a “working group” represented all parties.

All this information is communicated in a fairly distributed and ad-hoc manner. The labor to communicate deal information via email, fax, courier and in many cases physical travel in onerous. The shear number of communication “transactions”, number of emails, number of faxes, couriers and phone calls, number in the thousands. Of course each communication is liable to go “missing” or most certainly “untracked”. Was it received by the right person? was the information relayed correctly? or did the receiving party call for more time because they claim they did not get the information in the first place? Read more…