How a leading global asset allocator turned fund document review from a burden into a competitive advantage

When a LinkedIn post about Most-Favored-Nation (MFN) elections landed on the desk of a compliance officer at a leading asset allocator, he forwarded to the firm’s Head of Legal with a simple note: "Might this be of use?" They were looking for a better way to manage MFN processes. They reached out to Covenant looking for a better way to manage MFN processes, but the conversation quickly expanded. During that initial call, Covenant introduced its fund review offering.

The firm was skeptical. They already had a traditional law firm handling that work. But Covenant offered a trial on a single fund review, at no cost, on a fund the firm had already paid outside counsel to review. The comparison was unambiguous. They've sent every fund review to Covenant since.

The problem with 300 pages and a billable clock

The firm advises in respect of private markets investments on behalf of institutional investors globally. Every fund commitment made across that client base requires legal review as part of the firm’s diligence process: a 100+-page limited partnership agreement distilled into something the firm's investment team can actually use to make decisions and negotiate terms.

At that volume, the work had become "hugely burdensome." The firm was paying a traditional law firm to perform those reviews, and the output, while technically sound, wasn't built for how the team actually operates. Investment teams received copy-and-pasted excerpts from the fund documentation rather than user-friendly summaries they could engage with directly. The legal team then had to pre-digest that material before it could reach the research team at all, adding another layer of internal processing to every review cycle.

"The product is much more user-friendly at a much better rate on much better timelines than we were accustomed to before. It makes our research team much more engaged in the process than they ever were."

A workflow rebuilt around a different kind of output

The process is now a lot smoother and more engaging for all teams involved in the process. Fund documents go to Covenant; the team receives a report drafted with the help of AI and reviewed by a Covenant attorney that the legal and research teams can review concurrently rather than sequentially. They then join a live call with the assigned Covenant lawyer, who takes notes in the platform in real time as the teams work through any flagged negotiation points. By the end of the call, a GP-facing comment memo is taking shape.

A member of the firm's legal team points to something beyond the mechanics: the confidence that comes from knowing a human reviewed the output before it arrived.

"There's actually somebody that knows what they're talking about reviewing the output before it gets to us. If something slips through that really shouldn't have been commented on or the summary is wrong, there's somebody at Covenant that is patently embarrassed by the fact that they really should have caught that."

That accountability matters. The firm had previously evaluated AI-based legal tools offered by software companies. The output was reasonable. But without a qualified attorney behind it, they couldn't trust it and couldn't act on it.

"They are a law firm. They have human lawyers from top-tier law firms that are accountable for the output. That accountability is the key reason this works so well."

What the numbers look like

The legal team is saving four to six hours per person per fund review. Across the volume of reviews the firm runs annually, that compounds into roughly 500 to 700 hours saved per year. Absolute legal spend for this category of work has been cut by half — a result that arrived at a moment when firm leadership had been guided towards a material cost increase.

The investment team has benefited in a different way. Because they're now engaging with a genuinely readable report rather than receiving a dense legal summary written for lawyers, their participation in the review process has deepened. Negotiations with fund managers are more focused.

"When we get on a call with the Covenant team to walk through a report, it's not the legal team assuming the things that they might need to sign off on. It's them saying, 'Actually, we covered that in diligence, so we're comfortable with that point,' or 'That contradicts what the manager said in a meeting last week.'"

What the portfolio looks like from the inside

Because every fund review flows through Covenant's platform, the firm now has structured legal data across its entire portfolio — fees, terms, and key provisions queryable across every fund they've advised on. It's a view of the portfolio that didn't exist before, when reviews lived in law firm emails and PDF attachments that no one could search across.

It's a use case that didn't exist before because the infrastructure wasn't there to make it work at that speed and cost. That's the through-line in how this firm talks about Covenant: not a vendor that made an existing process cheaper, but a firm that changed what the process could actually do.