'Finding all relevant info in one place is a great asset'

Multidisciplinary team

Agio Legal—like Agio Capital and Agio Finance—is part of the advisory and supportive Agio Group. It is a specialised law firm that strives for a true partnership with its clients. 'These are companies—from outgrown SMEs to corporates—that operate both domestically and across borders', explains corporate M&A partner Nicole Van Ranst. 'By facilitating and unburdening them to the maximum regarding legal issues and risk management, they can fully focus on their core business.'

Agio Group has about eighty professionals, about half of whom are lawyers within Agio Legal. They work from five offices in Antwerp, Brussels and Hasselt. 'Every case, we try to handle as much as possible as a team', they say.

Entity management

Since 2020, Nicole Van Ranst worked on a major 'buy & build' story at one of her clients. 

'Because of the numerous acquisitions, we needed a good entity management system', she testifies. 'That had to help us streamline the various acquired companies, get mandate management under control and provide organisation charts. Such tasks are very time-consuming, so we started looking for a tool to help us do this. That's how we ended up with Corporify.'

'I strongly believe in the added value that certain 'legal tech' solutions can bring to a law firm like ours. They save you time, which you can use to take care of your clients even better. In short: a win-win situation. But the results you achieve with such a tool do depend on the roadmap and support offered by the software developer. Corporify's team inspired the most confidence in our initial choice, and it would later turn out that this feeling was completely justified.'

‘A world of difference'

Integrating the Corporify software into Agio Legal's corporate environment reportedly went smoothly.

Nicole Van Ranst: 'I can compare with other solutions we tried to implement here, and I can assure you: it was a world of difference. Moreover, there is a good manual to fall back on, and any questions are answered quickly.'

Corporify's users are spread throughout Agio Legal's corporate team. Together with three other lawyers and two paralegals, Nicole says she consults the platform daily. 'I myself use it mainly as a reliable source of information', she says. 'The fact that you can find all relevant data in one place is an important asset. So you can safely describe Corporify as a 'single source of truth'. The link to a number of official channels gives extra confidence.'

'It also allows you to provide a customer with an overview of exactly what their organisation looks like at any time. An organisational chart, an overview of the shareholders or a list of the UBOs (ultimate beneficial owners, nvdr) can really be downloaded in a flash.'

Avoiding actions

For all documents that need to be signed as part of an M&A transaction, Agio Legal tries to have Corporify as much as possible.

'In the paper era, you had to print everything first and then sometimes organise real signing sessions', recalls Nicole Van Ranst.

'Afterwards, all signed documents were then scanned, named and sent. Thanks to Corporify's digital capabilities, we can avoid all these manual operations. I mentioned earlier the time savings that 'legal tech' solutions can bring. Well, that turns out to be quite impressive.'

 Nicole sees the overview of shareholding—including all the details—as perhaps the most important added value of the Corporify platform. "But the simplified document management and the ability to track share transactions are also crucial for me", she says.

'For my M&A team, the user-friendliness in terms of document preparation is probably the biggest plus. Especially in the area of automation—think, for example, having address details entered in documents—we want to get to know the extensive possibilities even better in the future.'