Frances Kim is a Commercial Real Estate Finance Partner at Nelson Mullins. Her practice handles complex, document-heavy transactions for clients who are increasingly sensitive to fees and increasingly attentive to delivery. When the firm’s existing setup started slowing the team down, partners needed a way to run transactions that didn’t rely on hours of paralegal assembly work and document hunting at every closing.
Replacing that patchwork of storage systems with a single platform has changed more than the workflow. Paralegals no longer build closing binders from scratch. Junior associates find their feet on new matters faster. Bills hold up better with clients paying close attention to where their fees go.
When admin starts eating into the deal
For a team running real estate transactions of any complexity, admin doesn’t scale linearly. It scales with every entity, every diligence item, every closing condition. Before Legatics, that admin was being absorbed across multiple storage systems and deep folder structures, with paralegals and assistants spending hours pulling materials together for closing sets and junior associates taking longer than experienced lawyers to track down what they needed.
The cumulative effect showed up where partners feel it most: in the bill. Document-management costs had a way of ballooning on complex matters and that was getting harder to defend with clients who were paying close attention to how their fees were spent.
How Nelson Mullins made the switch stick
Plenty of legal technology gets tested at firms and quietly drops out of use a few weeks later. The team had seen it happen with other tools: one or two enthusiasts would champion the platform, but it never reached enough of the group to become how the team worked. With Legatics, the path to adoption looked different.
A team leader spotted the platform and brought it to a junior partner to run a hands-on demo. The firm’s CTO was looped in for a test run. What made it stick from there was that the platform covered what one of the partners called the “center of the Venn diagram” of what a 40-attorney team actually needed. It was customizable enough to fit the way the team already worked: saved status sets, client templates that captured each client’s preferences and a layout that mapped to checklists everyone was already familiar with. Adoption didn’t require anyone to learn a new way of running deals. It worked the way they were already running them, with the admin friction stripped out.
What changed for paralegals and junior associates
The most visible shift was in the deal assembly work that paralegals and junior associates carried.
Take a routine task like preparing a certificate of incumbency. A typical real estate transaction can involve three to five entities, each with operating agreements running to hundreds of pages. Previously, assembling those stacks meant pulling files from different sources, getting them into the right order and putting it all together by hand. With Legatics, the documents already sit in the right order in the checklist, and a member of the support team can produce the bundle directly from there.
Closing binders changed in the same way. What used to mean a paralegal building a new index from scratch after every deal now means a paralegal making light edits to a set that’s generated automatically. What used to take days now finishes in hours.
There’s a quieter benefit for newer lawyers, too. An experienced lawyer who has used the firm’s legacy systems for years can find a document quickly; a junior associate doing the same task takes considerably longer. Because the structure of every Legatics matter is the same, that gap closes, and senior time isn’t being spent answering questions about where things are.
What changed for clients
The clearest benefit for clients shows up in the pace of delivery. Completion sets arrive sooner and in a more polished form, because they’re generated directly from the checklist rather than reassembled from scratch after closing. In a market where responsiveness is a real part of how clients judge their counsel, that matters.
For clients who want closer visibility into the work as it progresses, the platform’s external view lets them follow the checklist alongside their counsel. Nelson Mullins has clients on both sides of that line. Some prefer the traditional approach of arm’s-length updates. Others, particularly those rethinking how they work with outside counsel, welcome the more direct view. Some are already taking it up, and the team expects more to follow.
A working partnership, not just a vendor
The relationship between Nelson Mullins and the Legatics team is collaborative and ongoing. Communication runs both ways: the Legatics team checks in on how things are going, and Nelson Mullins’s lawyers share what’s working and where they see room to improve. Questions get fast, practical answers, and there have been in-person sessions at industry conferences where the team can walk through how they actually use the platform.
That collaboration matters more than it might sound. Adopting a new platform isn’t a one-off software decision; it’s a shift in how the team runs deals day to day. Having a vendor who stays close to how the platform is being used in practice has helped Legatics fit smoothly into the way Nelson Mullins works.
As Frances Kim puts it:
We have been approaching Legatics less as a product and more as a partnership, or maybe a combination of both.
The bottom line
For Nelson Mullins, the change shows up in where lawyer and paralegal time goes. Less of it spent assembling binders, hunting for documents and reconciling between systems. More of it spent on the legal work clients are paying for, with deliverables that arrive faster and bills that hold up to scrutiny. The result isn’t one headline metric. It’s the cumulative effect on every transaction the team runs.
Watch the case study video to hear Frances tell the story in her own words
