*Due to privacy concerns, the name of the company in this case study and its team members are not published.

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Discover how Athennian helped one of the largest private Canadian companies migrate from a counterproductive and fragmented cloud-based entity management provider to save time and optimize workflows. 

Company Profile

• This in-house legal department operates under a privately held, fourth-generation family company headquartered in Montréal, Canada.
• The company aims to transform renewable resources into sustainable, high-quality essentials for everyday life. 
• In addition to this company’s production facilities across Canada and the U.S., they also own and operate a portfolio of 42 green energy power plants and are a North American leader in paper and paperboard recycling.
• This in-house legal team have been Athennian users since June, 2020
  
  

Challenge

Prior to upgrading to Athennian, this in-house legal team was working off of another cloud-based platform. It was not a good “out of the box” solution, and it wasn’t built to accommodate the unique needs of this team. The developers of this platform were forcing it to transform, which meant it was littered with frustrating technical glitches and was not intuitive. 

Goals

✅ This in-house legal team needed a true “out of the box” solution so that they could hit the ground running. 

✅ The team needed a way to streamline daily workflows and save time by automating manual processes. 

✅ They wanted to migrate to one single database so that all offices could work together more efficiently. 

Action

The Corporate Secretary who was leading the project to migrate over to Athennian explained that their previous entity management system, though it was cloud-based, was not intuitive for their users. Athennian’s dedicated migration team supported the in-house legal department’s upgrade over to their new platform.

“The most work that we had to do was fill in our excel spreadsheets provided by Athennian to migrate our information over, and that was the most time consuming part of the process. But once that was done, it was just a very easy switch. There wasn’t a big learning curve. Our experience overall with Athennian has just been very simple.” - Corporate Secretary, In-House Legal Department

Change management is also a very important aspect of upgrading to any new system. The Corporate Secretary we spoke with stated that their team had a definite fear of change, however, the team at Athennian helped them navigate this. After the migration, Athennian’s team of paralegals worked with the department to effectively train them on tools such as virtual minute books, task management, and managing documents. This made the upgrade to Athennian more manageable and empowering.

“People on our team were hesitant to learn a new system. Once we switched over, however, the feedback was ‘wow, this is so much easier, it's so much more functional, and it's so much faster’. There was some resistance at the beginning, but once our team actually saw the product and started using it, they were convinced.” - Corporate Secretary, In-House Legal Department

Results

Athennian’s turn-key entity management solution meant that this in-house legal team could start managing their data quickly.

By automating manual processes and providing a library of templates, Athennian helps this in-house legal team save time and streamline their daily tasks. Their new Athennian workspace encourages collaboration and team efficiency.

“Athennian has a lot more functionality than we originally thought. The biggest benefit of Athennian is the efficiency. We had a lot of document templates coded for us, and so the capability we now have of reusing regular documents is great, and makes our team more efficient.” - Corporate Secretary, In-House Legal Department‍

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Why Athennian

With Athennian, this in-house legal team is now able to save time using virtual tools that are reliable, and constantly being optimized. This has helped the team increase efficiency while working remotely. 

The Corporate Secretary managing this project specifically outlined that their team finds Athennian very easy and intuitive - they’re able to go in and modify documents or data by themselves without needing additional support. Even though this team hasn’t been using Athennian for very long, they stated that they already see the innovation and commitment that our delivery team makes to consistently optimizing the product every day.

“I would recommend Athennian to not just law firms but to in-house legal departments like us as well. Athennian isn’t a six month implementation - we had to dedicate a resource for a few weeks to support the migration from our side, and then we were up and running. It was very painless. Athennian’s value for time and value for dollars is very high.” - Corporate Secretary, In-House Legal Department

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