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.