When Craig Crow joined Trinity University as its inaugural Director of Investments, he arrived with a clear mandate: build a private markets program worthy of the institution's ambitions. The endowment, now approaching $2.4 billion, supports over 40% of the university's annual operating budget, funding scholarships, professorships, and research. Crow wanted Trinity to participate in the market like a larger institution, taking co-investments alongside its GP partners, negotiating meaningfully on side letters, and building a private markets program with real depth.
Pierre Duran joined as Investment Manager to lead Private Markets, bringing experience from KKR and the Teacher Retirement System of Texas. Finding legal counsel that could keep pace with that ambition, at a cost structure that made sense for an endowment of Trinity's size, was the operational challenge. Covenant became the answer.
Legal review built for how the team actually works
LPA review is time-consuming and costly regardless of who performs it. For an endowment like Trinity’s, writing checks that are smaller relative to fund sizes, the economics of traditional outside counsel made frequent engagement difficult to justify. Turnaround times of two to three weeks were standard. The cost per review was substantial.
Working with Covenant, Trinity now spends approximately 60% less on LPA review than it did with traditional outside counsel, with turnaround running two to four days. The team now sends everything through Covenant, including MFN reviews previously handled internally, because the value justifies the cost at every deal size.
"This has been such an unlock from a productivity perspective, from just an efficiency standpoint in terms of being able to turn things around quickly, while still getting what feels like really high-touch, thoughtful legal advice."
— Pierre Duran, Investment Manager
When speed and quality both matter
The impact has been sharpest in situations where speed and negotiating quality are both required. Covenant's counsel focuses the team on the provisions most likely to move rather than negotiating every fine point, and across every fund commitment Trinity has made through Covenant, its legal position has improved. That holds even for an endowment writing $10 to $15 million checks into funds many times that size, and with top-decile venture and growth equity managers known for compressed timelines and limited tolerance for document changes.
The clearest example came on a co-investment in a healthcare company. Trinity had indicated interest in participating alongside an existing GP partner. The window was a week and a half, and legal review needed to be completed before a commitment could be made. Covenant turned the full review in 24 hours. Trinity closed the deal, and the GP, a partner that had not historically run many co-investments, came away with a stronger sense of what an institutional LP process looks like at its best.
Craig Crow has described the relationship to Trinity's investment committee and board in terms that reflect how the endowment now thinks about legal services more broadly:
"It is a law firm with an AI-forward process, not a software business selling legal services."
— Craig Crow, CIO
"Every side letter we've done since we've been working with Covenant has materially improved our position from the last one."
— Pierre Duran, Investment Manager