Managing A High Volume Of Acquisitions With A Lean In-House Team

To achieve their mission of providing top-notch, locally managed veterinary practices, VetCor continues to rapidly expand its impressive network of 800+ practices across the United States and Canada. VetCor’s growth objectives include more than 100 acquisitions closed annually, which amounts to a lot of work for the in-house legal team.

“Our team is small but nimble, and we’re responsible for handling 99% of our acquisitions in-house,” said John Prindiville, senior corporate counsel for VetCor. “It’s a considerable amount of paperwork for our team to process, and that’s why we began looking for solutions that could assist us in maximizing the efficiency of our document review and drafting.”

The true tipping point, said Prindiville, was when VetCor merged with a competitor and identified the potential risk of having conflicting documents in the marketplace.

“We realized that it was a very good time for us to deploy some new technology to try to map things over and standardize our documents as we go out into the market as a new, unified brand,” Prindiville said.

Finding a solution built to suit their needs

Even before the VetCor legal team determined they needed a technology solution, Prindiville regularly received sales pitches for various contract management products, but he wasn’t convinced. The well-established products on the market didn’t offer the kind of tailored solution that addressed the team’s needs.

However, in May 2023 Bloomberg Law debuted Contract Solutions, an AI-powered solution for storing, managing, drafting, reviewing, negotiating, and analyzing contracts.

Prindiville was initially attracted to Contract Solutions because it’s a new product that offers the opportunity to influence the development from the start.

“We feel like our input is valued,” he said of working with the Bloomberg Law product development team. “We’re thrilled that each time we provide our feedback, the team takes that back to the developers and they’re building things that are going to be useful to us.”

He also appreciates that the Bloomberg Law developers came from a place of deep knowledge and understanding of the contract workflow challenges impacting in-house counsel.

“They understood from the minute that we met them what our needs were and how to address them,” Prindiville said.

In fact, Bloomberg Law Contract Solutions was developed in close consultation with corporate legal teams and with feedback from hundreds of in-house attorneys and legal professionals.

Its features include:

• A secure, centralized repository that automatically extracts clauses from finalized agreements providing an organized single source of truth for all contracts, clauses, templates, and related documents that can be filtered, sorted, and searched across – with little to no data entry.
• Seamless integration with Microsoft Word that allows users to access their cloud-based contract repository and clause library directly from their document, providing a fast and easy starting point for drafting and revising contracts.
• Advanced analysis tools built into Microsoft Word accelerate the review of draft agreements and allow users to efficiently identify and incorporate preferred language to ensure favorable terms.
• AI-powered extraction of key dates and contractual terms, provides greater visibility into final agreements to help identify and flag potential risks and obligations.

A smarter approach to document review and drafting

The stand-out functionality of Bloomberg Law Contract Solutions from Prindiville’s point of view is the effortless integration with Microsoft Word. For example, the instant access to the company’s clause library, as well as clauses from millions of publicly available contracts, and the ability to compare or find similar clauses without having to leave Word.

“Most attorneys will tell you that they are in Word all day, every day, regardless of what line of trade they’re in,” Prindiville said. “It’s been very helpful for us to be able to have one window open with a particular document and to be able to work within that atmosphere. It does save a considerable amount of time.”

Another common challenge for the VetCor team when reviewing or editing a clause is understanding how similar language was handled in the past. Work that previously required a significant amount of time is now as simple as a single click in Contract Solutions.

“The way that Bloomberg Law Contract Solutions uses AI in the clause identification tool is very helpful for our team because the tool removes the guesswork of determining whether there is a modification to our agreement that requires our full attention,” said Prindiville.

Spending less time on review and more time on negotiations

The ease of implementation meant that the VetCor legal team began realizing the benefits of Bloomberg Law Contract Solutions right away.

“Everyone’s noticed the value of having this tool is getting time back in our day,” Prindiville said. “We have more time to spend on a thoughtful response to opposing counsel and really to perform more efficiently because of this tool.”

What previously could take hours of painstaking review, flipping back and forth between versions, or repeatedly checking for definitions, is now possible with the click of a button using Contract Solutions. This saves Prindiville and his team from rote, tedious tasks that take time away from more highly skilled legal work and consultation.

“This product enables you to think more clearly and be more focused in your negotiations,” Prindiville said. “It saves you time, it makes you a better attorney by allowing you to develop greater depth in each document, and it gives you more opportunities to provide a thoughtful response.”