Summary
Corporate legal departments are grappling with complex and increasing legal and regulatory workloads while managing their numerous entities, often burdened by manual processes and fragmented documentation across platforms. Recent regulatory changes, such as the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) driven reporting requirements on beneficial ownership (BOI), have added to their workload by introducing beneficial ownership reporting requirements. Wolters Kluwer's Legisway offers a comprehensive solution, consolidating corporate legal data into a single, organized database. This Software as a Service (SaaS) platform caters to small to mid-sized legal departments, streamlining workflows and offering robust reporting capabilities for functions like managing contracts and entities. Legisway's entity management module centralizes critical corporate information, enabling easy generation of org charts, shareholdings, and key appointments and eliminates data silos. Legisway transforms entity documents into a key asset, enabling the corporate law department to drive enhanced governance and compliance while saving resources to focus on risk management.
Table of Contents
1. What are the challenges for entity management with new beneficial ownership reporting requirements?
2. How Legisway’s entity software module can help corporate legal departments.
3. Key features of Legisway’s Entity Management Module.
4. Real-world impact of Legisway on a Real Estate Investment Trust.
5. Learn more with a live demo.
What are the challenges in entity management for beneficial ownership reporting?
Corporate legal departments grapple with numerous legal and regulatory complexities as they navigate daily operations and long-term strategies. Their pivotal role in upholding good governance while facilitating business activities and stakeholder interests is undeniable. One such task is entity management, which often involves hundreds or even thousands of entities with complex inter-relationships, cross-shareholding, jurisdictional intricacies, and extensive contractual dealings. Unfortunately, this process is often plagued by manual management, and fragmented documentation across platforms like OneDrive, SharePoint and Office Suite and other home-grown or unconnected point solutions, resulting in increased work hours, errors, and difficulty in tracking legacy entities and changes.
The enactment of the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) as part of the Anti-Money Laundering Act (2020) has introduced new beneficial ownership (BOI) reporting requirements to FINCEN for certain corporate entities, LLCs, and similar entities operating or registered in the US. With filing deadlines looming in early January 2024, many legal departments now face a substantial workload in assessing which entities are exempt or not exempt and ensuring timely compliance with the regulatory reporting requirements.
How can Legisway help legal professionals with entity management and other legal tasks?
Wolters Kluwer’s Legisway offers a comprehensive solution to address these pressing challenges. Our Legisway platform is a unique, all-in-one solution with a single data repository, consolidating scattered legal data from documents and spreadsheets into one organized relational database – a true single source of truth. This platform has been meticulously designed to cater to the specific needs of small to mid-sized corporate legal departments that predominantly handle in-house legal matters. Our Software as a Service (SaaS) solution offers modular use cases, streamlined workflows, and robust reporting capabilities tailored for key legal department functions such as contract lifecycle management, asset management, intellectual property management, and entity management, among others. Additionally, it includes a user-friendly legal intake/ticketing system for streamlined communication within the department and with internal stakeholders.
What are the key features and functionality of Legisway’s Entity Reporting module?
Within the entity management module, you gain the ability to seamlessly manage critical information related to business registrations, officer and director appointments, shareholdings, key dates, and licenses. This empowers you with a holistic view of corporate details on a per-entity basis, allowing for the quick generation of dynamic org charts that can be effortlessly filtered, modified, and exported to provide a global overview of your company structure at any given date.
By centralizing your key data in a single source of truth with full audit trails, Legisway eradicates data silos, reduces the need for data reconciliation, and mitigates errors and inefficiencies resulting from inaccurate or incomplete data sets.
Real-world Example:
For an Associate General Counsel at a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT), overseeing 1200+ legal entities across various jurisdictions, the challenge of fragmented governance and compliance data loomed large. With vital legal information scattered across disparate sources like Excel spreadsheets, SharePoint folders, and point solutions, the need to pull information and insights together easily and accurately was a very manual process and a major pain point.
Enter Legisway's Entity Management module. It offers a systematic and automated approach to oversee various facets of legal entities. This module seamlessly connects data, documents, key personnel, and organizational charts.
The result? A comprehensive view of the entire business that enhances control and delivers valuable insights – which was transformational for this REIT’s Corporate Law Department. Moreover, this integrated approach elevated entity management beyond a mere compliance requirement. It morphed into a value-driven function that now actively contributes to the overall success of the business.
With Legisway, the REIT not only meets compliance standards but also harnesses the power of streamlined data for strategic decision-making, ultimately driving business excellence.
