The Dodd-Frank revolution has financial companies many times the size of Bethesda, Md.-based American Capital Ltd. at a near frenzy, trying to modernize practices to meet the continuing flow of new global reporting and record-keeping requirements. With only 350 employees companywide at the publicly traded private-equity firm, general counsel Samuel Flax and his 13-attorney staff decided to fight the battle with four technology projects that have cut significant time, paper and confusion out of their brave new regulatory world.
"I’ve been practicing for 30 years, and everything today is so different," said Flax, who also serves as executive vice president and secretary. "Today, technology touches everything we do in regard to our business every operating business in which we invest, every legal matter in which we’re involved, every interaction with our investors and every aspect of our communications is digital now." According to Flax, 2012 was the year the department really started making that digital tsunami work for the company. The revolution began with LawBase litigation management software by Synaptec Software Inc. to help the department keep better track of litigation, documents, deadlines and related materials. The second move was to install Symantec Corp.’s Discovery Accelerator to search, sort and store data from a wide variety of computer-based resources including email.
