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from MinuteBox

Digitization of minute books and corporate records makes things more convenient for law firms and their clients. Digitized records are far more secure than paper documents, and there’s virtually zero risk of any files being lost or misplaced, as can be the case with physical records. More importantly, entity management software can help improve client relationships and boost client satisfaction.

Clients have the choice of working with a firm that embraces innovative technology, capable of providing answers to pressing questions in a matter of minutes. They can also work with firms that rely on physical binders of corporate documents to cater to their needs, which requires hours of sorting, filing, and re-filing to uncover answers to potential questions. Which scenario is most likely to lead to satisfied clients and long-term working relationships that support the growth of your own firm?

So what are some examples of how companies have benefitted from entity management software and the digitization of minute book records? Here are three key success stories that will hopefully inspire you to pursue a similar path with your own business.

Bianchi Presta LLP: “exactly as advertised”

Bianchi Presta LLP is a mid-size full-service law-firm that offers top quality legal services in a cost-effective and timely manner. Part of their pledge to fulfill that commitment required a modernized approach to minute book management and corporate record documentation. They wanted an entity management platform that could set the firm up for success.

Following a failed trial relationship with another company, Bianchi Presta LLP turned to MinuteBox as a trusted provider of these solutions. An initial meeting and presentation of how the platform works, as well as honoring commitments to properly train and onboard the Bianchi Presta LLP team, led the firm to implement MinuteBox’s solution.

MinuteBox’s documentation experts arrived on-site at the Bianchi Presta LLP offices. Within a matter of two days, they had uploaded over 3,500 corporate records into the cloud-based platform and successfully onboarded several members of the Bianchi Presta LLP team.

SHTB: Digitized minute book management process

Stevenson Hood Thornton Beaubier (SHTB) LLP is a full service law firm that works with individuals as well as large, occasionally multinational corporations. For years, they maintained over 2,000 physical minute book records documenting all of their work to support client needs.

Upon learning about entity management software, SHTB saw an opportunity to digitize their minute book archives. Connecting with MinuteBox, their legal team discovered the cost-saving benefits of entity management technology that would reduce office storage space for physical minute book binders.

“It felt like our office space was packed to the rafters with minute books, and we thought ‘what do we do now? What really appealed to us about MinuteBox was that their cloud-based entity management solution was exactly what we needed once we converted our books from physical to digital.”

• Zeke E. Zimonick, Partner, Stevenson Hood Thornton Beaubier LLP.

Lewis Birnberg Hanet LLP: “best gift any firm gives clerks”

Lewis Birnberg Hanet, LLP (LBH) is an Entertainment Law Firm serving Canada’s booming film and television industries. Though they rely on technology to conduct vast amounts of legal research for their clients, they were initially reliant on paper-based minute book records to oversee client needs.

Realizing they required a digitized database to keep up with the needs of their clients, LBH learned about MinuteBox as a reliable resource to:

1. Centralize all client minute books into one digital database
2. Find instantaneous answers to pressing client questions

The LBH legal team would traditionally spend hours tracking down important client information using manual searches through physical minute book binders. With MinuteBox, searches through important records are completed within a matter of minutes. This allows their team to better service their own clients and support more meaningful relationships with their points of contact.

“MinuteBox is the best gift any firm could give their law clerks. It preserves the look and integrity of the traditional burgundy minute book while also creating a searchable database of your complete collection of binders.”

• Nora M. Webster, Corporate Law Clerk, LBH

Is your firm ready to embrace the digitization of minute book records? Join the MinuteBox revolution so that you can find the same degree of success as these other firms and build more long-lasting, sustainable relationships with your most valuable clients.

Many attorneys believe that a succession plan is only necessary when approaching retirement. However, this negates the possibility of other unexpected occurrences that may impact the prosperity of the firm.

Law firm succession planning is a business strategy that supports future plans for solo or small firms. It’s a formal process that transitions a lawyer’s practice to another attorney in the wake of unexpected circumstances. Similarly, an entire legal entity can use a succession plan to transition their business to another firm, or to close down the firm in its entirety.

The purpose of any legal succession planning is to protect the interests of the practicing attorneys, the firm’s reputation, and the clients serviced by those practices. Surprisingly, less than one in four law firms has established succession plans for their respective practices.

Why law firms need succession planning

An effective legal professional is always prepared to deliver results. Part of an effective preparation strategy includes succession planning to account for any unexpected circumstances that could change a legal practitioner’s ability to serve clients. Examples of unexpected circumstances include things like:

• Loss or suspension of a practicing license
• Onset of life-threatening illnesses
• Debilitating disabilities that make practicing law impossible
• Family emergencies that require an extended leave of absence
• Sudden loss of life

A succession plan is a forward-thinking strategy that accounts for the possibility of one or more of these unexpected events disrupting an organization’s ability to provide legal services to clients. Failure to implement a proper succession planning strategy could leave clients at a loss in the midst of ongoing legal cases. This could lead to incidents that include:

• Missed court hearings and sessions
• Corporate documents left unfiled in proper timelines
• Client files stored in unsecure locations
• Incomplete wills, trusts, and other testamentary documents
• Corporate minute books with inaccurate or out of date information

Reasons to create law firm succession plans

Similar to how an elder family member creates an estate plan to pass on inheritances to their respective heirs, succession planning is all about preparing for future events in the present timeline. Succession planning strategies signal that your firm has a long-term vision and an effective strategy in place to achieve that vision.

Here is a quick breakdown of some of the top reasons why you need a formalized succession plan.

Succession planning protects the interests of your clients

This is arguably one of the most important reasons practicing legal professionals and their respective firms should establish succession plans. Clients and anyone you represent, as an attorney or a business partner, are protected by documented succession plans.

Suppose you’re a solo attorney practicing law at an established firm. Should unexpected circumstances occur, and you’re no longer able to continue your career as an attorney, your clients require ongoing legal assistance. Likely, they have documents in the form of wills, trusts, or real estate deals that need to be signed, filed, and formalized.

As their direct point of contact at a firm, your job is to ensure they receive the services they need. Without succession planning in place, those needs may go unmet, causing the clients to lash out at the firm as a result. This could endanger the reputation of the firm and your own personal reputation, especially if your absence from practicing law is only a temporary hiatus.

Succession planning improves your firm’s relationship with insurers

Malpractice claims are high-risk incidents for insurers. Rates and coverage issued to practicing attorneys and their firms are determined, at least in part, by the degree of risk for malpractice cases issued against your practice.

In cases involving elder attorneys, who have reduced their roles to part-time work in a semi-retired state, there is a higher degree of risk associated with the firm. A lack of proper succession planning, which would include mandatory retirement ages and appropriate reviews of caseloads managed by those elder practitioners, helps insurers feel more confident in your firm’s ability to maintain high quality legal services for clients.

Succession planning helps you prepare for your own retirement

Let’s say you’re a practicing attorney at a firm. You may have founded or co-founded the firm; additionally, you may have achieved the status of partner over the course of your practicing career. Now, you’ve approached the age where it’s time to think about retirement.

When you have an effective succession planning strategy implemented, the transition into retirement is much smoother. You can reassign any outstanding cases to other attorneys at your firm, and you can pass on leadership of the firm to other partners who are ready to continue building upon your established reputation. This ensures you have peace of mind and decreases the risk of malpractice claims that may be filed following your exit from the legal community.

How to use entity management software to support succession planning strategies

When creating a succession plan, it’s important to collect and store all important information about your legal practice in one convenient location. Storing critical files about your practice across multiple sources increases the risk of losing or misplacing those documents. This could leave the firm at risk of a breach of confidentiality, or prone to charges of failure to maintain privacy protection mandates to protect your clients’ personal information.

Entity management software is an effective resource that can help supplement your succession planning strategies.  Entity management software allows you to make official records in an orderly digitized document. You can use the platform to keep track of all details about the succession plans, where those details are stored, and how to access the documents. It’s a more efficient and structured way to execute your succession plan.

An effective succession plan contains critical information about your clients, your firm, any partnerships with outside vendors, and passwords or other access information to technological platforms. As you assemble all of these pieces of information, use your entity management platform as a digitized succession planning checklist to ensure nothing is lost in the transition. It will keep your legal team well-informed and far less stressed about losing any vital information.

Succession planning for corporations ————————————
Legal professionals and the firms they represent aren’t the only ones that can benefit from an effective succession plan. Corporations also must prepare for unexpected circumstances or the retirement of a senior executive. Check out our helpful guide on The Director Resignation Checklist for details on how to transition to new senior leadership at your corporate entity.

The machines will take over. That was one of the most stark warnings from sci-fi thrillers like The Terminator that warned about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence. AI has become ubiquitous across much of society these days, and new developments in technology will give AI an even greater role in the workplace.

Platforms like ChatGPT have taken the world by storm. Global companies quickly adopted the platform as a fast and scalable solution to accelerate repetitive tasks. While many business owners praise the AI solution as a time-saving asset, there are those who fear their jobs are at risk of becoming irrelevant.

Technology doesn’t need to be considered a threat. Instead, it can be a valuable tool to empower law clerks and help legal professionals increase opportunities to boost Legal Recurring Revenue for their respective firms.

ChatGPT is meant to support specialists not replace them

Platforms like ChatGPT are designed to mimic human conversationalists. Since the platform is powered by AI, it’s a constant state of learning and development. Users can ask ChatGPT to recommend suggestions for things like email communications, and the platform automatically generates a message that can be copied into an email distribution channel.

There are limitations with the technology. For one thing, the context is not always clear. Since the platform can’t know all the nuanced pieces of information that are relevant to the intended recipient of those communications, the messaging can be light on subject matter. A human touch is necessary to edit the AI-suggested comms with more depth and insight.

Additionally, while it was designed to mimic human interactions, the suggested copy doesn’t offer the same personalized touch that a human provides. This is especially important to consider in the legal space. Legal services are, in part, about building supportive relationships with clients. Communications notably lacking human empathy risk derailing those relationships.

Law clerks can use AI to become more efficient

Now, we’ve just identified some of the limitations of platforms like ChatGPT. Here’s the other side of that coin: they can also make administrative and clerical work much easier, especially for law clerks in small to mid-sized firms.

As part of a firm’s need to provide transparent client communications, a summary of all meeting minutes will go into a corporate minute book. Law clerks can use the AI capabilities of these solutions to simply draft a message that outlines the summary of those minutes. The clerk can then add in specific points from the meetings to add more context to the message.

Instead of typing out an email summarizing those points, the platform does that work on the clerk’s behalf. This is a great time saving use of technology that streamlines the administrative and clerical work involved with supporting clients.

Law clerks are even more efficient with entity management technology

One of the biggest logistical challenges for law clerks is sorting through binders upon binders of minute book records for a myriad of different clients. Entity management software simplifies this process by eliminating those paper records from the equation. Clerks can scan and upload all minute book records into the platform, which automatically curates documents into standard PDF files that can be sorted, tagged, and organized in a digital archive.

The platform is cloud-based, which makes it easy to access records from any location. Clerks can update records during attorney-client meetings rather than carry physical records back to the firm’s office to complete the amendments. The platform is also highly secure, backed by biometric and hardware key authentications that prohibit anyone without specific permission from accessing the account.

Leverage the right AI solutions to simplify your workflow

Not all legal technologies are powered by AI, and not every legal scenario requires an assist from modern technology. But there are certain occasions when solutions like ChatGPT can make a difference and streamline professionals’ day to day work habits.

For example, an innovative solution known as Second Chair is one of these technological assets. Similar to ChatGPT, Second Chair provides helpful suggestions on how to draft language for certain documents. The distinction is that Second Chair is designed to complement entity management workflows. Its purpose is to provide written suggestions to draft important documents for business entities. Some of the common documents include:

• Articles of Incorporation
• Director residencies
• Shareholder resolutions
• Entity registration documents
• Entity dissolution documents
• Client communications
• Etc.

Time efficiency is a law clerk’s greatest strength

Law firms invest in their clerks’ budding futures by providing these advanced technologies to assist with their day to day duties. Rather than fear these innovative solutions, law clerks should embrace the potential time savings that they can provide.

As firms seek more opportunities to grow Legal Recurring Revenue, clerks should identify ways to support these growth initiatives. By delegating more clerical tasks to technology, clerks can function as the primary representative of the firm when dealing with clients. The practicing attorneys can use their own billable hours for more strategic discussions with clients, while clerks respond to client inquiries about the status of their cases.
Legal technology can modernize law firms and assist law clerks with their own duties and responsibilities. Now is the time to embrace innovation! Learn more about how solutions like entity management technology can transform your legal practice.

Corporate paralegals are essential team members of a general counsel or corporate legal department. Their primary duties are to assist professionals with account research, records management, and consultations with other department heads or external vendors. Paralegals are essential cogs in a corporate legal machine.

A sizable percentage of a corporate paralegal’s day is tied up in the management of clerical and administrative work. All these tasks are essential to the longevity and security of any corporation. But they require a substantial amount of a paralegal’s time to manage.

Corporations typically measure employee performance by their contributions to the growth of the business entity. When paralegals are inundated with piles of clerical and administrative paperwork, it limits their ability to make those contributions. In some instances, the disconnect between corporate expectations and the day to day workload can cause paralegal burnout.

Why corporate paralegals need entity management software

Entity management software assists legal professionals with the management of corporate data, enterprise security, and especially clerical or administrative work. Legal entity management solutions protect sensitive corporate data, automate repetitive legal department tasks, and help all legal professionals become more efficient and productive.

Paralegals are the primary beneficiaries of entity management software. Here are four of the main reasons why corporate paralegals need legal entity management technology to improve their own workflows and make greater contributions to the future of the corporation.

Streamline the filing and management of corporate records

A paralegal’s most time consuming responsibilities involve the filing and management of corporate entity records. It involves repetitive data entry tasks that are important for the business, but they’re very time consuming for paralegals.

Entity management technology helps automate these workflows. The software includes built-in templates for minute book records, enabling paralegals to simply input data into pre-assembled fields rather than create the records from scratch.

It’s a far more efficient way to complete essential corporate entity responsibilities. Paralegals can improve their own utilization rates – i.e. the percentage of an eight-hour day spent on growth-generating initiatives – and make greater contributions to the corporation.

The Clio Legal Trends Report is a detailed study showing how corporate entities improve paralegal utilization rates by adopting legal entity management technology into their operations. According to the report, utilization rates have increased an average of 18 percent over the past six years.

Corporations that invest in legal entity management technology understand that every hour of legal work is valuable to the business. Providing paralegals with innovative solutions ensures your corporation gets the most bang for its buck from every member of your legal team.

Create faster and easier ways to acquire signatory approvals

Any legal documentation cannot be finalized without signatory approval from key stakeholders. It’s how corporations maintain transparency and accountability in an effort to promote responsible corporate governance and compliance protocols.

Corporate paralegals typically sit in on important meetings between various corporate executives. They document the key discussion points and summarize the conversation for all stakeholders to review at a later date.

Sometimes, these meetings involve both internal and external stakeholders. This is more common when discussing a merger or acquisition, or a collaborative partnership between one entity and another. Therefore, paralegals must secure signatory sign-off from both their colleagues and external partners.

Entity management software includes built-in e-signature capabilities that allow executives to instantly sign-off on documents. Paralegals can organize, communicate, and finalize records from important executive meetings all within the convenience of the platform. This is a far more efficient and effective way to achieve sign-off on important documents than creating a long thread of back and forth email communications with multiple stakeholders.

Track shareholder activity and accurately report all transactions

Every corporate entity has a board of directors, largely composed of wealthy investors. Every investor takes an ownership stake in the corporation, and their ownership percentage is monitored through the issue and transfer of corporate shares.

Part of a corporation’s compliance program is to accurately and diligently report any shareholder activity to the appropriate regulators. Paralegals are typically tasked with the documentation of shareholder activity, requiring them to update shareholder ledgers with recent transactions that alter the ownership of the corporation.

Traditionally, this process was as tedious as clerical and administrative updates to minute book documents. Paralegals would document new share issues using pen or paper or an Excel spreadsheet and make the appropriate updates as necessary.

Using entity management software, this process becomes far more automated. Entity management technology provides shareholder ledger templates that can be populated with the names, titles, business addresses, and ownership percentages of each shareholder. Any new issue or transfer of shares can be updated in just a few seconds, and the platform intuitively displays the updates in summarized shareholder ledger reports.

It’s faster, easier, and remains in compliance with the laws, so why not make it part of your corporate entity management process?

Reduce legal risk and maintain corporate compliance

Any corporate entity is concerned about its own exposure to legal or financial penalties for non-compliance. Federal regulators are enacting legislation to crack down on non-compliance and white collar crimes, creating greater concerns about risk and disruptions to business.

A large part of any general counsel’s and in-house legal department’s responsibilities is to develop, manage, and oversee a corporate compliance program. Entity management software makes these responsibilities much more efficient for paralegals and their superiors.

Entity management technology has a built-in compliance framework that provides a diligent overview of everything your business entity needs to remain in compliance with the laws. The framework includes things like organizational charts, calendars, workflows, and other templates to monitor for any errors in statutory non-compliance, and date-based compliance tasks.
Your paralegals can use the compliance framework to construct and standardize your corporation’s compliance program. It provides a documented source of truth that all executives, employees, shareholders, and other business partners can use to maintain compliance.

Corporate entities maintain sensitive minute book records to document vital legal entity data. Minute book records contain legally sensitive information about the business hierarchy, ethics, and compliance policies, as well as confidential shareholder information.

Sometimes, multiple executives or members of the general counsel department must edit, share, or otherwise handle these secure minute book records. Teams must collaborate as they hand off protected data without compromising the security of the entity or violating compliance protocols from government regulators.

Maintaining the privacy and sensitivity of these minute book records is one of the core benefits of entity management software. Platforms like MinuteBox help teams streamline minute book management with more secure and efficient workflows.

Secure Collaboration is a secure collaborative feature in entity management platforms that helps modernize minute book management. Here are three of the primary ways that secure collaboration protects sensitive legal entity data to help maintain corporate compliance.

Secure share grants platform access to minute book data

Data security is absolutely essential when managing corporate minute book records. It’s imperative that legal entity data remain protected under lock and key as general counsel manages the records.

There’s always a risk that data could be lost, misplaced, or compromised when shared over email. PDF or Excel files with vital corporate entity data are at risk of exposure when sent across different email servers and addresses.

The benefit of Secure Collaboration’s Secure Share feature is that it eliminates this workflow altogether. Grant team members portal access to the platform with secure passwordless logins. You can see who accesses the platform, apply granular share limits to specific data, and set an automatic expiration date for the portal to maintain corporate security. No more emailing PDFs!

Real-Time Collaboration makes cooperation a breeze

Part of legal entity security is knowing who makes what updates to the records, and when those changes are made. Traditionally, general counsel maintains a manual audit in a spreadsheet that documents when any new changes are made to the records.

Using entity management software’s Real-time Collaboration feature, all the manual work is eliminated from the process. A secure audit trail tracks every change within the platform, providing a diligently documented record of any updates to minute book data.

Additionally, the feature delivers real-time notifications that let you know when anyone else is viewing the records. All changes can be marked as drafts until general counsel can review and sign off on them. This means all drafted changes can be saved in real-time, ensuring no updates are lost in the hand-off between collaborators.

Advanced Reporting allows oversight of all legal entities

Not every executive, director, or shareholder needs to see every piece of data within your corporate minute books. In fact, most of them aren’t interested in anything more than the absolute essentials.

Using entity management software’s Advanced Reporting feature, you can create comprehensive reporting filters to describe specific legal entity data to your superiors. The reports are dynamic and easily shareable within the platform, granting all users access to the data at the appropriate times.

The reports are fully customizable, allowing you to tailor how the information is reported based on the recipients. This feature makes legal entity management fun, simple, and accurate!

Improve executive satisfaction with secure record-sharing

The main benefit of Secure Collaboration and all its corresponding features is more secure corporate record-sharing. But the supplementary benefit is that it improves interpersonal relationships between collaborators and superiors.

Efficient and streamlined collaboration means the right people get the answers they need faster and easier. As a result, entity management as a practice satisfies the requirements for corporate compliance and makes everyone’s lives easier. When executive lives are made easier, everyone feels happier and more satisfied with their work!

Ready to create a more secure and collaborative approach to minute book management? Join the MinuteBox revolution, introduce Secure Collaboration to your legal entity management workflows, and improve the satisfaction of maintaining compliance.

An organizational chart displays the internal structure of a business entity. Each employee’s name is represented within boxes or other shapes, often with a corresponding photo to provide a face with the name.

At the top of most organizational charts are the chief executives, who direct the operations of the company. In some instances, the organizational charts will include members of the Board of Directors and shareholders with significant ownership in the corporation.

The purpose of organizational charts is to create documented illustrations of working relationships, reporting relationships, and corporate hierarchies. Organizational charts instill effective corporate governance throughout the business entity when appropriately developed.

Visualize Ownership and Entity Relationships in Real Time

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Benefits of organizational charts and corporate hierarchies

Organizational charts provide the structure that allows key business decisions to get done. Corporate hierarchies, established by organizational charts, enable corporate executives to implement the mandates of proper corporate governance.

Corporate governance encompasses all the rules, practices, and processes that help business leaders manage how the entity operates. Organizational charts give key decision makers the authority and influence to enforce corporate governance policies and procedures. Collectively, these documented structures help the business maintain momentum and achieve growth.

What happens without structured organizational charts?

There are significant risks for corporate entities that do not create structured organizational charts. Those risks can be relatively minor, in the form of small fines from government regulators. On the other hand, some business leaders can drive their companies into bankruptcy and subject themselves to criminal indictments.

The most recent example of the latter scenario is the FTX cryptocurrency bankruptcy. Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was charged with eight counts of federal crimes in the United States, including conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, for misappropriating client funds.

The cryptocurrency exchange filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in November 2022. The newly appointed CEO revealed in federal testimony that, under SBF’s leadership, there were no organizational charts at FTX, no corporate governance policies, and a blatant disregard for maintaining compliance with federal laws.

How to create organizational charts with entity management software

One of the chief advantages of entity management software is its intuitiveness. Entity management platforms like MinuteBox were built for non-technical business leaders and legal professionals. The platform relies on no-code document assembly programming to simplify entity management workflows, including the creation of structured organizational charts.

Here’s a basic overview of how to create your own corporate organizational charts using entity management software like MinuteBox.

1. Input the names and titles of your employee registry

Entity management software streamlines most administrative tasks and responsibilities. Data entry specialists, administrative managers, or paralegal professionals are often tasked with data management. The platforms simplify their workflows, translating processes to sort and organize all the data, from hourly commitments down to mere minutes of work.

The one area of this workflow that can’t be simplified is the initial input of corporate data. This is the most time consuming step in the process. However, the platform does include built-in modules that outline exactly where and how to input employee information so that the organizational charts are properly created.

1. Save your work and submit the data into the platform

Complete the insertion of all the names and titles of your employees, executives, board directors, and shareholders. Save your data entries and submit the filings into the platform.

Remember that entity management software is designed to be intuitive. The platform understands the data you’ve inputted, and it intuitively knows how to structure and organize the data into the files you need. The names and titles of your entire corporate registry will automatically be organized into detailed organizational charts.

1. Download your organizational charts into PDF documents

Your organizational charts are automatically generated in a matter of seconds once you submit your data into the platform. Simply select download on the generated file, and you’ll receive structured organizational charts in the form of PDF documents.

If you need to disseminate the files to corporate executives, this is the way to do so. On the other hand, you can keep the organizational charts within your entity management platform and refer to the documents whenever necessary.

Use entity management software to help structure your corporate entity

Entity management software like MinuteBox makes the process of creating organizational charts quick and painless. The documents are produced in record time, and they can serve as one of the foundational pillars of your corporate governance policies.