LegalTech Tapas – Adrian Camara, CEO at Athennian

Welcome to the latest LegalTech Tapas podcast on Artificial Lawyer with Andrew Jardine. Today we speak to Adrian Camara, Founder and CEO of Athennian, which is a legal entity management software company.

But what is legal entity management and why is it important? And what does Athennian’s product do? All of this and more is explored in today’s podcast.

If you can’t listen just now, check out a partial transcript below. (Press play to listen – 18 mins approx.)

Episode transcript: What does Athennian do?

For a change this week we will be looking at a legal tool that doesn’t claim to use any AI (for the time being at least), an entity management application Athennian, that makes it easy for businesses to keep track of and manage their corporate records. Joining us to talk about all that and more will be Adrian Camara, Athenian Founder and CEO.

Now legal entity management may not seem like the sexiest topic in the world, but it is an important and necessary activity for  businesses especially those that have complicated entity structures. It’s not uncommon for big businesses to have hundreds of different legal entities so they can comply with regulatory regimes or even just do business in different parts of the world. This unfortunately makes staying on top of the reporting requirements time consuming and easy to forget about, which isn’t ideal when missing your reporting deadlines could land you with a hefty penalty. On top of that, managing entities can be labour intensive as you have to deal with multiple parties and antiquated government systems.

In general entity management tools look to solve these problems by doing two things. Firstly, they act as a kind of CRM for your entities keeping all relevant records in a single place, which makes it easier to share that data when regulators or somebody else needs it. Secondly, they help facilitate related workflows like issuing equity, registering new entities or filing your annual reports, so your team can spend less time doing routine paperwork and more time tackling real business problems.

To give you one specific example, if you needed to create a new business entity, Athennian would automatically generate the required documents (share certificates, minutes and the like), submit the registration electronically, automatically store all the entity information and then next year remind you when it is time to file annual reports. Sounds like a lot right? And I haven’t even touched on things like issuing dividends, changing directors or company amalgamations.

However, where Athennian really differs from legacy tools which surprisingly people are still using on-premise, is that it brings these functions in to the cloud, kind of making Athennian the Salesforce of the entity management world. One specific benefit of using Athennian in the cloud, on top of the usual ones, is that Athennian has much better connectivity with government portals and other external systems, meaning that you can register a new entity or e-file your annual reports with the required authorities without having to leave the application.

Episode transcript: Who should use Athennian?

In general the organisations that benefit from using entity management applications are the ones that have a high volume of entities to manage, which means either law firms that are managing a lot of entities on behalf of clients, or large corporations that tend to have complex entity structures for regulatory, tax or other purposes. If you don’t have a high number of entities then chances are managing your entities is not really much of a pain point for you.

Because this problem is not a new one, many organisations will already have some solution in place. Therefore the organisations I expect will benefit most from Athennian will be the ones that are still using older legacy on-premise solutions. Upgrading to Athennian (or another cloud based offering), would enable them to connect disparate processes that are currently silo’d, creating a seamless flow of information in addition to just storing entity data. 

Athennian.com is the top reviewed legal entity management cloud platform used by the world’s leading law firms and legal departments. Integrating entity data management, document assembly, eSign, org charts, and e-file, Athennian is selected by modern legal and tax teams to scale legal entity governance. Athennian offers rapid migration for customers from any legacy database including ALF, CorpLink, EnAct, GlobalAct, EnGlobe, FastCompany, Corporate Focus, Blueprint (Diligent Entities), GEMS, Secretariat, hCue, Effacts and more.

About LegalTech Tapas

LegalTech Tapas is a regular podcast that serves up bite sized summaries of the latest legal tools, what they do, and why you might use them. Each episode discusses a different legal tool, and includes an interview with a guest from that company so you can hear directly from the horses mouth why you should be using their product. To get the next episode direct to your inbox, sign up @ https://legaltechtapas.substack.com/ or follow us on Twitter @legaltechtapas.