EDB Uses LinkSquares to Uncover Insights From 4,000+ Global Contracts

Founded in 2004 and based in Bedford, Massachusetts, EDB is a global database software solutions and services provider specializing in the open-source database, PostgreSQL. With 16 offices worldwide, EDB serves over 5,000 customers, including leading financial services, government, media and communications, and information technology organizations.

Paul Lucchese, Vice President and General Counsel, established EDB’s legal department as its first General Counsel in 2015. As General Counsel, Paul manages a team of three, which is responsible for worldwide legal and compliance, including worldwide contracts, international expansion, data privacy, corporate compliance, including open source and export compliance, and maintenance for 17 legal entities worldwide.

When Paul first started the legal function at EDB, the contracting process was through Google Drive, Microsoft Word, and spreadsheets. Over the next few years, additional systems were added: Confluence for storage, AdobeSign for execution, Microsoft Excel for key terms and information. With EDB scaling rapidly and acquiring another company, it became more difficult for Paul’s team to efficiently manage dozens of inbound legal requests across the global Sales team and over 4,000 executed agreements. As EDB scaled, Paul knew that he needed a contract management system in place to help automate some of the team’s arduous, manual work, so the team could focus on higher-value tasks such as compliance management, complex negotiations, and global legal strategy.

In 2019, EDB was acquired by a private equity firm, Great Hill Partners, and in order to prepare for the acquisition, Paul’s legal team ran through a complex due diligence process, without a contract management system in place.

“Everything we were doing was purely manual. We went through this complex due diligence process when we got purchased and had to go through every contract just to find answers to questions like ‘What kind of liability had we agreed to?’ ‘Do we have any best nations pricing?’ ‘What does our assignment clause look like across different agreements?’. It would have been great to have a system that could pull these insights for us,” Paul said.

“And now, as the company continues to scale, the team is managing more contracts and fielding more requests from Sales. We simply needed a way to automate and centralize the entire legal process and all of our contracts into one platform. This is when I doubled down on my search for a contract management system.”

It was at this point that Paul re-engaged with LinkSquares and conducted a demonstration of the product on his own data. Within 48 hours, Paul and his legal team saw the magic of LinkSquares.

“I evaluated multiple other contract management systems and talked to other legal teams in my network to figure out the best tool. Time and time again, I heard that LinkSquares delivered the best customer experience and that a customer-focused team would support me along the way. At the end of the day, I didn’t need to choose between the best analytics and having CLM. LinkSquares offered me both.”

Paul was able to move his entire contract drafting, review, execution, and management process into LinkSquares, creating a single system of record for the EDB legal team, which provides visibility into which contracts are being created, where they are in the process, who is submitting requests, and what agreed-upon terms are in previously executed contracts.

LinkSquares Analyze makes it easier for EDB’s Legal Operations Manager to tag, organize, find, and reference historical contract records for invoicing and creating amendments and addendums. This minimizes the amount of time spent on finding the right contract and reporting on historical data.

With LinkSquares Finalize, the EDB legal team can now:

• easily collaborate with over 100 sales colleagues worldwide
• manage over 45 different intake forms, templates, and questionnaires
• create self-service processes for simple agreements such as NDAs using pre-negotiated language and clauses stored in Clause Library
• set up request forms for agreements that require legal involvement such as Software Agreements, Partner Agreements, and Manufacturing Authorization Forms
• review, redline, finalize, and send contracts for signature in DocuSign

LinkSquares enables EDB to manage their legal processes more efficiently, while also providing the flexibility to structure these processes in a way that works for them.

“Our Customer Success Manager is great: he’s patient, helpful, supportive, and always helping us get more out of the software. The product team is always open to hearing my ideas about making the product even better. It’s clear they care about me as a customer.”