After a few years of corporate law, Amir Reshef realized that typical methods for closing deals weren't taking advantage of innovation, so he co-founded a company to change that.
dealcloser is an online platform aimed at making the transaction process more efficient and accurate. It works by automating or eliminating many of the non-value-added administrative tasks required to keep a deal running smoothly.
"The status quo deal-closing process is very manual, paper-heavy and work-intensive," said Reshef, '14 MBA/JD. "The idea for dealcloser came from living the problem first-hand."
A speaker at the upcoming 2020 Legal Innovation Conference on January 17, Reshef says that before starting university, he wasn't interested in his own company. However, as he learned about entrepreneurship during the MBA portion of his program, he decided to work as a lawyer for a maximum of five years before switching over into something more entrepreneurial.
"I decided that I'd work as a corporate lawyer to gain a skill set that would be valuable to startups," said Reshef. "I said a max of five years to avoid the golden handcuffs from stopping my plan."
dealcloser is marketed for merger and acquisition transactions, purchase and sale of businesses, and for tax transactions, annual resolutions and incorporations.
The online platform allows a user to register for a 14-day trial to give the application a test run.
To begin a project, a user starts with the "project agenda." This is akin to a closing checklist made with a word processing application. The next step is to use dealcloser's secure, online document storage to upload all document versions and attachments. These can then be viewed and edited by others involved with the project.
After that, other collaborators (such as other lawyers and advisors) can work in real-time on the project. Features include being able to compare changes between document versions to note any changes between versions.
Finally, clients can access their transaction documents through a secure client portal and easily review and sign their documents.
As of December 2019, the online platform had almost 2,000 users, with roughly 34,000 documents uploaded and 16,000 signatures collected to-date. Overall, dealcloser has already been used to close almost 1,000 deals.
One of the many perks Reshef enjoys by being a business owner instead of a corporate lawyer is having the freedom to work from anywhere; he spent December working out of Colombia and Israel.
Passionate about working in the legal innovation sphere, Reshef was invited to attend the inaugural Legal Innovation Conference in 2018, but was unable to make it. After attending last year and enjoying what he heard, Reshef is excited to speak about innovation at this year's conference.
"I thought I would take this path during law school in that I knew I'd join a tech company at some point," said Reshef. "I never thought I'd start a tech company, however, much less a legal tech company."