Hartman Simons & Wood LLP

Hartman Simons & Wood LLP (HSW) is a leading commercial real estate transactional law firm based in Atlanta, with a significant national presence in retail, industrial, and office.

Situation and Objective

Before DealSumm, HSW had a team of three that would manually abstract leases for clients. This process utilized a significant portion of their time each day and quickly became a daunting task.

On top of the hours it took to prepare a complex lease abstract, the manual abstraction process resulted in hundreds of unlinked PDFs. Every time a client needed information, they had to go through a pile of abstracts and had no way to compile the data.

Exasperated with the lack of efficiency for client and in-house teams. They searched for a linked and integrated way to provide a much better product. Bob Simons, a founding partner, repeatedly asked HSW’s IT department for a solution, insisting there’s got to be a better way.

Solution

Serendipitously, Bob Simons ran into Robert Hultslander, a longstanding industry friend and DealSumm’s North American VP of Sales, at a party. While talking shop, Bob shared his frustration regarding manual abstraction, reporting, and the need for a more efficient approach, and Robert exclaimed: “that’s exactly what we’re doing!”

After further discussions, HSW decided to partner with DealSumm and started with full-service LeaseView abstraction and double human review – to save time in-house – and worked with DealSumm to tailor and refine the platform to HSW’s needs.

Outcome and Benefits

HSW found DealSumm’s team is attentive, cooperative, and willing to listen to its needs.

Delighted with the results, HSW became a long-term client. And, with many clients loving the delivered abstracts and reporting capability, some went on to become independent DealSumm clients.

HSW leverages DealSumm internally and also hosts the DealSumm platform for clients, including landlords, developers, owners, and investors who enjoy myriad benefits:

• Clients love the ability to sit at a terminal or iPad and be able to call up all the leases across their portfolio and have the data instantly at their fingertips.
• HSW’s paralegals love it as they can instantly find all addresses and information in one report, making it easy to issue estoppel letters and notices to all tenants when selling a shopping center or office building.
• All users find it user friendly from a reporting and editing standpoint.

Now, HSW uses DealSumm’s DIY LeaseExpress: “What would have previously taken 20 hours, and resulted in a 20-30 page lease abstract, now takes 1.5 hours to produce an abstract we’re confident sharing with clients. That’s less than 1/10th the time, and more than 90% savings,” relates Simons.

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