Nicolas Joucla is a partner at Lexco, a business law firm created in 2005, with offices in Bordeaux, Paris and Réunion. Composed of more than fifteen lawyers, the firm provides counsel to its clients on their legal issues and business litigation.
Nicolas Joucla has practiced law since 2007, his work focusing on sales, mergers and acquisitions, and fundraising transactions. He also assists his clients in the contractualization of their relations with their partners.
Closd: Hello Mr. Joucla. Could you introduce us to Lexco, its clients and the matters it handles?
NJ: Lexco offers support in all areas of business law, both in counsel and in litigation, to a varied clientele made up of companies, mainly SMEs and Mid-cap companies, operating in all areas of the economy.
We have strong M&A expertise, both in transactional and in group structuring, which is supported by a large corporate team. Another of our specificities is providing in-depth advice on business managers’ tax and estate issues.
Finally, we offer the full range of services of a business firm, whether in social, tax, contractual or litigation matters.
Closd: What is the firm’s digital strategy? What are its other areas of development?
Above all, we seek efficiency in the services we deliver, and responsiveness in handling our clients’ requests. In this sense, it is now essential to integrate digitalization as an integral part of our professional activity.
We have thus for some time integrated LexisNexis services into our processes, with increasing use of PolyOffice and more recently through an expansion of the LexisNexis documentation databases that we use daily. PolyOffice’s transition to a SaaS model is also part of the firm’s digital strategy, even though this had several drawbacks at the start.
We are also highly aware of legal design, which increasingly integrates the structures that we establish, both in legal and tax structuring of groups of companies, and in the tax and estate support of business managers, which are areas in which we distinguish ourselves.
Closd: Why did you choose Closd? What needs does the platform meet?
We chose Closd because of its advantages over other providers on several levels:
- We were enticed by the global approach that the designers of Closd adopted. They took the entire M&A process into account, integrating a data room tool with the usual functionalities (classification, Bible extraction), a space for sharing project documentation with the goal of replacing email loops, and of course an electronic signature tool, all in one space.
- The platform’s design is appealing and very intuitive;
- Finally, the positioning in terms of costs was good, in particular by the flexibility of the subscription (whereas other competitors imposed consumption levels that weren’t in line with our needs).
Closd: Which cases do you use Closd for and what benefits do you derive from the platform?
We initially only used Closd in transactional matters, but we quickly extended its use to the entire corporate department, both for document sharing with our clients’ legal and financial departments, and for electronic signatures.
This dynamic was favored by the expansion of the possibilities of recording deeds concluded using electronic signatures a year ago.
We therefore sign all types of deeds daily on Closd.
Closd: Are your clients and interlocutors satisfied with the use of the platform?
Our clientele is spread over France (including, of course, Reunion Island, where we have strong activity), and a few major accounts located internationally. Under these conditions, combining the fluidity of a document exchange platform and the flexibility of an electronic signature tool that is instantly accessible with our usual service offering has been very favorably received by our clients.
Closd: Nearly two years after the start of our partnership, how would you assess it?
We very much appreciate what Closd brings to our daily business. The results are very satisfactory, and I want to emphasize that the availability of the Closd team is a real plus. Of course, we did not escape a few “closing difficulties”, but we were able to count on the responsiveness of key people at Closd, who even called us back late at night to solve some technical difficulties!
Finally, what we also really liked was the ability to influence the tool’s development. Closd being a young tool, we had the feeling that our user experiences were taken into account and that developments were made quickly to improve or debug this or that feature.
Thanks to Mr Joucla for his testimony. If you want to learn more about Closd, schedule a demo now!
