Automate Share Purchase Agreements with Docusign in 4 Easy Steps
Sep 09, 2024
A share purchase agreement (SPA) is a legal contract between a buyer and seller outlining the terms of a sale and transfer of shares in a company. This document details essential information like the number of shares, the purchase price, and the obligations of both parties.
SPAs are crucial in corporate transactions such as mergers and acquisitions, often requiring signatures from multiple parties. Managing these documents manually can be time-consuming and prone to errors, especially when many signatories are involved.
If you're still manually handling share purchase agreements, it's time to explore how automation with Docusign can simplify the process, reduce errors, and save time, allowing you to focus on more strategic legal work. If you're a complete beginner with Docusign, you can easily learn it in this article.
This guide will show you how to generate documents, collect signatures, and compile closing packets easily with Docusign. Welcome to the future of corporate law practice!
Key Takeaways
- Automating share purchase agreements with Docusign speeds up the process and increases accuracy, eliminating errors due to manual entries.
- Instead of manually uploading documents, one click can bulk upload all share purchase agreements to Docusign for electronic signature collection.
- Docusign’s interface may not be ideal for tracking large numbers of documents. Integrating Docusign tracking with your database can help manage and track signatures more efficiently.
- The closing date can be automatically added to each share purchase agreement, even after signatures, through automation.
Table of Contents
What Is Document Workflow Automation?
Document workflow automation is the process of using technology to manage, route, and complete legal documents without manual intervention. For corporate attorneys and law firms, this means automating tasks such as generating share purchase agreements, tracking signatures, and compiling closing packets.
There are 7 key benefit of automating your workflow according to the article of Thomson Reuters Legal Solutions. But, the main aim is to reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks, minimize errors, and free up time to focus on high-value activities such as client advisory and strategy. By learning how to automate share purchase agreements with Docusign, you can streamline these tasks and ensure efficiency.
Traditionally, closing a deal involving shareholders required a lot of manual work: creating documents, duplicating signature pages, copying and pasting information from one document to another, and manually tracking who had signed and who hadn’t. This process is not only time-consuming but also prone to errors that can delay closings and frustrate clients.
With document workflow automation, every share purchase agreement is accurate, every signature is tracked, and every closing packet is compiled without manual intervention. The result is a faster, more efficient closing process that reduces stress and enhances client satisfaction.
Why Document Workflow Automation Matters for Corporate Attorneys
In the highly competitive world of venture capital, time is of the essence and any delay can result in lost opportunities. For VC attorneys, who often juggle multiple deals at once, the ability to close deals quickly and efficiently is critical. You can see in this law firm case study on how document workflow automation boost their speed 10x.
Example: Automating a Shareholder Agreement: You must generate a purchase agreement for 100 shareholders. Traditionally, you would manually copy-paste each shareholder’s information into the document, check and recheck for errors, and then move on to the following document.
With automation, you simply insert placeholders where the investor’s name, investment amount, and other details should go in your Word document.
Then, Docusign or other mail merge tools will automatically pull this information from your purchaser schedule and generate a complete set of documents for each shareholder without any manual intervention.
This process method benefits attorneys in several ways:
- Manual processes are slow and prone to errors. Automating your document workflows ensures that every step of the share purchase agreement process is handled quickly and accurately. For lawyers, errors in documents can be catastrophic—one mistake can cost millions and irreparably damage your reputation. This article from Law Fuel explains how a single missing word in a multimillion-dollar contract led to a $300 million loss. Automating helps you avoid these risks.
- Improved Client Satisfaction: Clients expect their attorneys to be efficient and effective. By learning how to automate share purchase agreements with Docusign, you can provide a faster, more reliable service that enhances client satisfaction. When clients see that you can close deals quickly and without errors, they’re more likely to return to you for future work.
- Competitive Advantage: In a competitive market, anything that sets you apart from your competitors is an advantage. Mastering how to automate share purchase agreements with Docusign gives you the edge by enabling faster and more accurate deal closings. This can be a key differentiator when clients are choosing which attorney or firm to work with.
- Future-Proofing Your Practice: As technology continues to evolve, the legal industry is becoming increasingly automated. Staying ahead of automation trends guarantees that you maintain the highest level of precision and efficiency in your practice.
How to Automate Your Document Workflow
Now that we’ve covered why document workflow automation is so important let’s dive into how you can start automating your own workflows. In this section, we’ll walk you through the steps involved in automating your document workflows, from creating documents to tracking signatures and compiling closing packets.
Step 1: Set up your Share Purchase Agreement templates
The first step in learning how to automate share purchase agreements with Docusign is automating document creation. This is done by turning your standard Word document templates into Word API-connected templates. These templates automatically pull data from your shareholder registry (or other data sources) and populate the documents without manual copy-pasting.
Docusign also now supports Word API templates, they call that feature 'Document Generation for eSignature' and we've covered how to set them up in this article. If your Docusign plan doesn't include Document Generation for eSignature, you will need to purchase additional mail merge software to automate the generation of documents.
Steps if your Docusign plan includes Document Generation for eSignature:
a) Set Up Word Templates with {{placeholders}}: Add {{placeholders}} in curly brackets in your Word templates such as {{purchaser_name}}. The placeholders will be replaced with actual data later. If you don't have one already, you can download a Word template here.
b) Create a Docusign template: Upload your Word document using a new Docusign template. Docusign will recognize the {{placeholders}} from within the Word document. Add anchor texts to ensure the Docusign signature fields for the shareholders remain in the correct location.
Steps if your Docusign plan doesn't include Document Generation for eSignature:
a) Set Up Word Templates with {{placeholders}}: Add {{placeholders}} in curly brackets in your Word templates such as {{purchaser_name}}. The placeholders will be replaced with actual data later.
b) Create a Docusign template: Upload your Word document in a new Docusign template. Add anchor texts to ensure the Docusign signature fields for the shareholders remain in the correct location.
c) Purchase a mail merge tool: Since Docusign will not generate the shareholder agreements due the feature 'Document Generation for eSignature' being missing in your plan, you must outsource this task to another piece of software. Choose a mail merge tool such as Woodpecker or Docupilot. These will generate documents and upload them to Docusign automatically.
d) Create a template in the mail merge tool: Follow the instructions for that specific tool to create a template and upload the document you've created in Word. Ensure that it recognizes all the {{placeholders}} from your Word document.
Step 2: Automate Document Generation
The next step in learning how to automate Share Purchase Agreements with Docusign is integrating the templates with your data source for seamless document generation. While many of you will be tempted to import your Excel data in bulk via CSV import into these Word API templates, there’s an easier way to bulk send via Docusign.
Importing CSV data directly in a template might seem attractive at first because you’re thinking that it will save you time. After all, all the documents are going to be created, error-free, and in one single import. So, why isn’t this interesting?
It’s because this method will not save you any time on all the post-signature tasks. Collecting signatures from shareholders isn’t just about creating and sending the documents. Those only represent the first phases of agreement workflows. Once the documents have been sent, they must also be managed, tracked and stored.
To automate the generation of the purchase agreements, you'll need to connect your templates to your data source, whether your purchaser schedule is stored in Excel, Salesforce, or another tool. Connecting templates to data sources can be achieved quickly with tools that do not require coding experience, such as Make.com or Zapier.
These tools will allow you to map the columns of your Schedule of purchasers to the {{placeholders}} of the templates you've set up in Step 2.
Step 3: Automate Signature Tracking
Once your documents are sent for signature, the next step is tracking who has signed and who hasn’t. Docusign provides real-time tracking of automated signatures which you can learn in this article.
By mastering how to automate investor agreements with Docusign, you can set up notifications to alert you when certain milestones are reached. However, Docusigns’ users interface isn’t built for large volumes of envelopes so you’ll need to constantly have to download Excel reports which won’t be kept in sync with the Docusign status.
If you set up an API integration between Docusign and your CRM or other database, you’ll be able to see who has signed your share purchase agreement directly in your favorite apps, without having to login to Docusign. If you don’t already use a CRM or database connected to Docusign, then the Solusign app already supports all these Docusign integrations.
Alternatively, you can use Zapier.com or Make.com to automatically update a "signing status" column in your purchasers' schedule in Excel.
Example: Monitoring Investor Signatures
Imagine you’ve sent 100 share purchase agreements to 100 shareholders, and you’re waiting for them to sign. Instead of manually checking each document, you can use Solusign’s real-time tracking feature to monitor who has signed and who hasn’t directly in your database.
If a shareholder hasn’t signed by the deadline, you can set up an automated reminder to be sent to them, prompting them to complete the process. This ensures that your deal closing stays on track and that you’re not left scrambling at the last minute to chase down signatures.
Step 4: Automate the compilation of Closing Packets
The final step in automating share purchase agreements with Docusign is compiling all signed documents into a closing packet. Automation can handle this step without any manual effort.
Automated Document Compilation
Once all your share purchase agreements are signed, you may need to add the closing date. And that closing date is only known after the Docusign envelope has been completed. Thankfully the Solusign app lets lawyers pick and add the closing data automatically after all counterparts have been signed.
Moreover, the app can automatically compile all shareholder’s counterparts into a final closing packet. This packet includes all the signed documents, side letters, organized in the correct order, and ready for distribution to shareholders.
Example: Compiling a Final Closing Packet
Let’s say you’ve collected signatures on purchase agreements, voting agreements, right of first refusal agreements, and investor rights agreements from 100 investors. With document workflow automation, all these signed documents are automatically compiled into a final closing packet, without any manual intervention.
Automated Distribution of Closing Packets
Once your closing packet is compiled, you can automate the distribution process as well. The Solusign app can send the closing packet to all the investors via email, ensuring that they receive the documents promptly and without any errors. This not only saves you time but also ensures that your investors receive their documents in a timely manner, enhancing their satisfaction and making your job easier.
FAQs
How much time can I save with document automation?
Automating Docusign workflows saves time by eliminating the need for manual tasks such as creating documents, tracking signatures, downloading and renaming signed PDFs, and updating your systems with the latest status. You'll also reduce errors in documents, meaning fewer follow-ups and less time spent correcting mistakes.
What tools do I need for automation?
You'll need three main components for document automation:
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A document generation tool that works with Word-based templates, so you can generate documents without manual copying and pasting. Examples include mail merge tools like DocuSign, Woodpecker Legal, or Docupilot.
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A cloud-based system to store your data, such as a CRM like Salesforce or a cloud database like Airtable.
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An integration platform to connect your document generation tool with your data. You can use tools like Zapier, Make.com, or Microsoft Power Automate for this.
Is document workflow automation secure?
The security of document workflow automation depends on the software you use. Look for tools that offer strong encryption, secure access controls, and compliance with standards like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR. Tools like DocuSign and WebMerge provide robust encryption and data protection to ensure your documents remain secure.
Can I customize automation for different deals?
Absolutely. Automation workflows can be tailored with templates and conditional sections to suit different types of transactions. It's not limited to a specific deal or industry—automation works for any repetitive process, making it adaptable for various use cases.
Conclusion
Mastering how to automate investor agreements with Docusign is no longer a luxury; it’s a necessity for VC attorneys who want to stay competitive. By automating your document creation, signature collection, and closing packet compilation processes, you can reduce errors, save time, and enhance client satisfaction.
Whether handling a few deals or managing a large portfolio, how to automate investor agreements with Docusign can transform your practice, making you more efficient and effective. The tools and techniques available today make it easier than ever to automate your workflows, freeing up your time to focus on what truly matters—advising your clients and closing more deals.
If you haven’t yet explored how to automate investor agreements with Docusign, now is the time to do so. The future of legal work is automated, and by embracing these technologies, you’re not only improving your current practice but also positioning yourself for long-term success.
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