As I’ve written before, when you are negotiating a deal, it can be extremely helpful to find similar legal documents and agreements drafted by top law firms.  This allows you to:

1. Save time drafting the deal language by leveraging someone else’s ideas (estimates range up to 65% of the drafting time)
2. Learn new ways to structure deal terms, such as pricing arrangements, guarantees, termination clauses, etc.
3. Gain competitive intelligence by seeing how other companies in the industry have structured their deals
4. If you’re negotiating against a particular law firm, or you know of a law firm with a very strong practice area that relates to your deal, you can research that law firm’s deals as well.

The first challenge, once you’ve decided to find legal agreements from a specific law firm, is to find a resource that allows you to search for the firm’s documents.  Of course, you can always use Google (and that may be how you found this blog, so I’m not complaining!).  This can be useful if you are just looking for 1 or 2 examples of a firm’s documents, but not if you want to really be able to search across a large number of that firm’s documents – there are just too many search results that are not on point. 

Let’s use a search for “Simpson Thacher legal agreements” (without the quotes) to illustrate this.  Google, in about a billionth of a second, comes back with 348,000 results.  That’s great, but a quick scan of the first several pages reveals that most of these links are not to Simpson Thacher legal agreements, but instead they are point to Simpson that may or may not involve the word agreements.

By contrast, I’ve linked to a resource above, which contains millions of profiled legal agreements and clauses from top law firms.  You can use the advanced legal document search tools to search specifically for Simpson Thacher agreements, search for agreement clauses, or jump straight to browsing hundreds of Simpson Thacher legal agreements and documents.  This allows a deal attorney or other professional to very quickly drill down and find exactly what is needed to better negotiate and draft the deal.