COVID-19 Drives Konexo Deal With Diligent for Board Data Governance

Konexo, the process-focused legal group of global law firm Eversheds Sutherland, has partnered with board and legal entity management platform, Diligent. The move has been partly driven by the fact COVID-19 has forced many corporate management teams to operate remotely, in turn pushing board governance and paperwork related to entity management entirely into the digital realm.

That then demands tech platforms that can help to manage this flow of complex and unstructured information, hence the deal with Diligent.

Graham Richardson, Partner and Head of Konexo, said: ‘The global pandemic has changed the way many organisations now operate. Adopting new technologies has always been at the forefront of our global growth strategy, and this has only been [accelerated] under the circumstances. We are pleased to team up with Diligent, a major player in the industry, to bring together technology and professional expertise to best support our clients.’

The corporate governance-focused deal will see Konexo, which recently expanded into the US, provide ‘an enhanced’ corporate secretarial service around the world. Konexo’s Corporate Secretarial team already offers a range of services to help manage legal entity lifecycles and support board management.

By coincidence, the deal comes just as another tech company focused on legal entity management, Athennian, has bagged $8m in funding to help it to expand the business globally (note: follow link for a useful AL TV overview of what legal entity management entails.)

Konexo will also help clients by taking ownership of Diligent’s software, facilitating the extraction of Management Information for client stakeholders to create bespoke regular reporting, and provide group structure charts and automated data validation, they added.

As for Diligent, what it does is offer a secure solution to ‘track and manage corporate data and board papers, making them available to the client and its stakeholders 24/7/365 from any location’.

What the Diligent platform covers.

This tech capability will be complemented by Konexo in over 100 jurisdictions through Eversheds Sutherlands’ independent global network, the legal process group said.

Liam Healy, SVP and Managing Director at Diligent, concluded: ‘By combining Diligent’s technology with Konexo’s corporate secretarial expertise, organisations can centralise and manage their subsidiary data and simplify entity governance throughout the entire organisation. Through this new partnership, we can offer cost efficiencies and insightful management reporting.’