Cowell Clarke | Case Study

About Cowell Clarke

Cowell Clarke is a national corporate and commercial law firm focused on helping organisations navigate regulatory and commercial environments. They combine specialist expertise with integrated legal, risk and compliance capability to deliver solutions that are commercially practical and built for implementation, not just advice.

With offices in Sydney and Adelaide, Cowell Clarke has spent more than a decade at the forefront of legal and compliance innovation, partnering with clients to streamline processes, embed governance and manage risk at scale.

The Challenge

Cowell Clarke faced the traditional challenges of managing diligence through a patchwork of documents and spreadsheets. This manual approach made version control difficult and created inefficiencies every time the data room was updated. Cowell Clarke were particularly interested in improving document review quality and transforming how deal teams work tightly across offices.

They required a solution to cut through the noise and ensure the highest quality standards for their busy team.

“We were seeking an innovative solution so that we can do better for our clients. We wanted to seamlessly manage unreliable data rooms and alleviate the administrative burden that exists in most diligence processes,” stated Chair of Cowell Clarke and lead director of the Commercial Transactions and Corporate practice groups, Megan Jongebloed.

“We want to ensure that diligence is delivered efficiency and effectively without waste at Cowell Clarke for our clients – we saw the power of Deeligence and realised we could equip our corporate and property lawyers with a tool that would help us deliver more value for our clients” said Rob Comazzetto, Chief Executive Officer.  

Results

The main benefits delivered for Cowell Clarke:

1. Ensuring lawyers maintained focus on the strategically important work and all the time-consuming project management tasks were handled through the Deeligence platform saving ~70+ hours on an average diligence
2. Better client service in making status updates and progress visible in real time
3. Work is delivered to a high quality for clients – AI accuracy at 92.5% before lawyer review

Cowell Clarke saw immediate efficiencies and time savings through Deeligence’s project management functionality.

“You would think the time saved would be AI, but my favourite part is the project management tools: figuring out what to review, saving it somewhere, finding a template, figuring out where to save – this is where Deeligence really helps” said Thomas Hill, Senior Associate.

Cowell Clarke was particularly impressed with how Deeligence enabled immediate status updates, without the need to take up time with excessive internal calls, meetings and emails typically rampant on diligence projects.

“The visibility is great, I was able to have limited dialogue with team members outside of the platform – because I can see where they are at in real time, I didn’t need to go and check,” said Hill.

Hill notes that this compounds, as the Deeligence platform resulted in a standard report from the start, where everyone is guided in a similar manner, increasing time savings.

Cowell Clarke also stated that using Deeligence and its AI powered contract review meant they could increase the speed of their contract review by 60%+ while also maintaining high levels of accuracy.

Lawyer, Alex Dorrington noted that “it picked up useful things and all references were correct, even on complex contracts.”

Associate Director, Anna Young underscored that Deeligence “was handy to check the work of my team with the summary side by side. The highlighted references from the AI meant I knew what I was looking at and could drill down through each clause, versus manually searching a document.”

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