Innovative Law Firm Gains Value from Accounting Seed

Meeting Legal Needs Around the World

Founders Legal (Bekiares Eliezer LLP) is a fast-growing boutique law firm that began in 2014, positioning itself in the heart of the Atlanta Tech Village, a hub for software developers, startups, and other technology-focused entrepreneurs. The firm has grown to serve over 1,000 active clients worldwide, offering legal counsel on intellectual property, technology, business, and transactional law. Their clients range from startups to well-established multinational companies, but all of them have the central need to protect unique ideas, structure their deals properly, and abide by legal regulations. The ability of Founders Legal to collectively assess individual issues and apply targeted legal counsel is essential.

Collaboration is a key ingredient to their organizational success. Partner, Andrei Tsygankov, mentioned that the office itself is an open plan, which is unusual for a law firm. Boundaries are kept, but generally, the experience and knowledge of the whole team are pooled together to address any kind of issues a client faces.

Leveraging their flexible service offerings, and the expertise of staff members from a wide range of business and “big law” backgrounds, Founders Legal is equipped to guide clients in everything from capital raising and mergers and acquisitions, to copyrights and patents.

Protecting Ideas and Operations

Safeguarding clients’ ideas is a core focus of Founders Legal. Intellectual property and software licensing—Andrei’s specialties—serve to solidify and commercialize the rights of the company and inventors over their valuable products/services. Without taking the steps to define the proper use of software and other technologies, businesses risk their work being stolen, altered, or being unfairly compensated.

Founders Legal works to ensure that companies legally protect their ideas and are empowered to successfully challenge infringements on their intellectual property. Founders Legal provides many in-depth services including trademarking, end-user agreements, and even branding identity solutions to maintain the integrity of business technology and define contractual relationships. They also work with business leaders to comply with data and privacy laws, as well as foreign requirements, to ensure operations proceed without legal backlash.

Andrei says that Founders Legal distinguishes itself from the old model of doing legal work by investing in technology and internal processes rather than just physical office space. Using cloud-based software for all of its core business needs, Founders Legal provides high-quality work faster and more efficiently, at a lower overall cost to their clients. This also helps the firm more effectively manage client relationships, docket critical deadlines, leverage its existing legal forms, and organize all its different legal projects.

A Need for Easy Access and Scalability

One of the biggest challenges Founders Legal faced was being able to accurately store and track client information. Using the Salesforce platform lets the firm maintain all of its client data in a single home and use a variety of other management tools to organize various matters and documents. They also needed an in-depth accounting software that was scalable for a growing client base, while allowing the firm to manage varying compensation models for its attorneys, patent agents, and other professionals. Accounting Seed’s customizability and comprehensive accounting features satisfied these needs, while also streamlining their entire financial management process. Andrei also elaborated that what ultimately drew Founders Legal to Accounting Seed is its flexibility:

 

“Accounting Seed is not a walled garden, we are not locked-in to someone else’s way of doing things. If something does not work the way we need it to, we can change it or build it to suit our needs. We can also leverage many of the unique, third-party tools available via the AppExchange.” – Andrei Tsygankov, Partner at Founders Legal (Bekiares Eliezer LLP)

 

By implementing Accounting Seed, Founders Legal was able to adapt the technology to their organization’s requirements and processes, instead of having to conform to software limitations. For example, they’ve created numerous custom objects to perform a variety of key functions including:

• Providing estimates to their clients for complex legal projects on a flat fee, capped fee, or hourly basis
• Tracking retainers received for quotes
• Tracking internal cost and burden rates for staff who work on the projects
• Visualizing the amount of the retainer remaining in real time (based on actual resource use)
• Easily converting estimates into billings upon completion
• Report profitability on a firm, group, project, or even individual attorney basis

Founders Legal also stores project-specific details in the same Accounting Seed environment to provide an accurate portrait of account activities. This enhances the visibility of the accounts for the whole team, as well as the respective clients, which also makes reporting and billing processes easier. Accounting Seed’s consolidated financial management system lets Founders Legal manage, report on, and visualize an extensive account portfolio while spending less time tracking down specific details. Additionally, Accounting Seed’s connection with Advologix enables Founders Legal to store and monitor their hours in the same environment as their accounting for added convenience. Founders Legal can now be focused on building their client relationships and growing as a law firm.