About Author
1-10 Employees
Managing Consultant, Edgar Kautzner
Discover how Minerra has overhauled their contracts using Zegal to create a streamlined system that takes minutes to execute.
Minerra is an analytics solution that uses data to help companies make better decisions. Based out of Australia, Minerra’s analytics provides an organisational capability that combines people, culture and the best technology to enable businesses to succeed.
What Minerra Does
Managing Consultant, Edgar Kautzner of Minerra says, “We do data, training and consulting. Everything we do is to help people use data more effectively —that could be running training courses to improve data literacy or helping people use various types of tools to analyze data, but it could also take the form of consultation. So, data strategy, different types of analytics consulting, and building dashboard data integration.”
A professional and streamlined system for legals
Edgar says, “We have two directors running the business and we’ve started scaling up and employing more people recently, but for a period of time, it was just the two of us. That meant we needed to be really efficient in the way that we go about our agreements.
Generally, for us, the first step after the initial discussion is to get an NDA in place so we can start discussing their situation in more detail. When we were doing it manually, it was cumbersome and awkward. We started using Zegal and we found two main benefits, one is around the mechanics of it:
It’s really easy to shoot out an NDA to somebody, get it signed, and then you can see when everyone’s countersigned the document. It’s all in one place, which is nice and neat. We have a decent amount of contracts that go through the system, and we’re no longer storing the emails on our shared drive somewhere.
And then the other side is around the templates. Because we often have different types of agreements that we need to put together, doing those from scratch is a lot of effort. To have templates to start with makes things a lot easier for us. And it’s really flexible with the ability to use a document for different purposes.
Sometimes we have a partner with who we’re looking at doing a venture that’s a little bit different to the core business. The fact that there are shareholders agreements and agreements for the initial stages of a startup, all those things are really useful to have so we’re not sorting through the minefield of Google. The fact that it’s all there on Zegal, we find it really useful.
Problem-free operations across different jurisdictions
Another reason Minerra decided on Zegal for their legals, Edgar explains, “One of the considerations, when we chose Zegal, was that we’re operating in different jurisdictions. So it needed to need to apply across different jurisdictions, which is the case with Zegal. And in terms of the legal prose being sound and solid. Also, the ability to make changes to the documents —because we often have scenarios where we need to go in and edit things— and then we can keep reusing existing contracts that we’ve done. There’s also the ability to upload a document that we’ve created and put them into the system.
I like the document builder on Zegal because it allows me to get a contract out so quickly. Recently we’ve had three different contractors that we’ve used and it’s important for us to get them to sign an NDA and I was able to get those done, I would say within five minutes on Zegal. I do not want to be spending half an hour, or an hour, of my time, putting a contract together —it’s just not a good use of my time.”
Compliance made quick and easy
Edgar says, “We’re now compliant with our own processes. An NDA or supplies of supply of services agreement can be in place for every engagement. Before Zegal, we may have had an NDA signed down the track a little bit, and that’s not really good practice. Now we’re quite rigid on the initial call that we do the NDA, and that we have the supply of services agreement all e-signed, as opposed to just doing work without having an official agreement in place, which we used to do quite a bit.
With Zegal, it shows that we’re professional and we use a proper document management system. I think many companies our size might just do things the manual way, but we prefer to work smarter rather than harder. We might be a smaller company, but it gives us the operational efficiencies that I think we get back many times over.
The only reason we didn’t do it, to begin with, was that it was hard work, and now it’s not hard work. It’s much easier to get those agreements in place really quickly. It would take me much longer before. And even the sort of the facilitation of multiple signatures, it’s just easy because it’s all handled on the platform. And a pretty serious benefit of the written agreements is knowing how much we’re going to be paid, and we all know what the scope of work is. That peace of mind is really important.”
Visit Minerra here.
This article does not constitute legal advice.
The opinions expressed in the column above represent the author’s own.
