Here's what's new at Covenant this month:
We get a lot of questions about what an AI-native law firm actually is. After talking with investors, we’ve settled on a simple answer. An AI-native law firm is first a law firm. Covenant’s lawyers are experts in their practice areas, and they work the way clients expect: answering emails, joining calls, and negotiating with the other side.
“AI-native” adds two things. The first is efficiency. AI speeds up the review of investment documents, and we pass those savings along to clients. The second is data. Covenant structures and organizes the output of each review instead of only summarizing it, so every review leaves behind usable information for the next deal. We call that terms intelligence.
The lawyers still make the calls. The data means each one starts from more than a blank page.
We love hearing from our readers. Please email us (jen@covenant.co) with any feedback, especially where we can improve.
— Jen Berrent and Richard Perris, Covenant Co-Founders
Client Story
Managing $4.8 billion with a four-person team
The Utah School and Institutional Trust Funds Office oversees $4.8 billion for Utah’s public schools and 10 other state institutional trusts. In a recent month, its team closed five funds through Covenant. On one secondary, the purchase and sale agreement arrived on a Tuesday, Covenant turned redlines in two days, and the deal closed by Friday.
Product Updates
Upgraded Covenant AI chat
Every answer draws on the same verified data that powers the rest of the platform.
- Always in view. Pin chat to any page, and it tailors its answers to the page it’s on.
- One-click term research. The sparkle beside a term opens a conversation with that term already loaded.
- One investment or many. Ask about a single deal, a selected set, or the full portfolio.
- Saved conversations. Chats are kept as work progresses and can be downloaded to share.
Covenant for Firms
Covenant is now available to law firms that represent investors. Outside counsel can use the platform to review agreements, generate a first-cut issues list, benchmark terms, and manage side letter negotiations, with drafts and summaries exporting to Word.
Covenant data in other AI tools
Covenant’s MCP server lets teams query their Covenant data from inside AI tools such as Claude, ChatGPT, and Microsoft Copilot, without logging in to the platform. To connect, email mcp@covenant.co, or join the live webinar on Wednesday, November 18 at 12:00 p.m. ET. Link to come!
Recognition
Covenant has been named to the 2026 Inc. Power Partners list in the Small & Mighty category, which recognizes B2B companies with fewer than 24 employees that pair deep expertise with hands-on service. Inc. lists Covenant as an AI law firm that serves investors in private markets.
Thank you to Inc., and to the clients who trust us with their private markets work.
See the full Small & Mighty list →
Events
Is it really "market"?
Covenant recently hosted a private evening with the head of terms intelligence for the private equity business at one of the world's largest institutional investors. The conversation focused on how data is transforming deal negotiation and execution. Takeaways:
- A decade of terms in one place. Working with Covenant, the institution built a repository of roughly a decade of fund and co-investment terms. When a GP calls a term market, the team can check, and GPs have become more receptive to LP pushback since it started bringing that data to the table.
- The negotiation now starts before the fundraise. Before a GP announces a re-up, the transaction team sets out the terms it wants and what it sees as market, with commitment size part of the conversation.
- The value continues after closing. Agreed terms, from negotiated fee discounts to expense caps, should show up in the financials, which turns a negotiation archive into a monitoring tool.
- Standardization is still the hard problem. Not every GP uses the LPA template, and expenses are reported differently across GPs.
Also this month
- ILPA Legal Conference (October 8–9, New York): Richard spoke on “The Cost of Private Equity: A Candid Discussion on Fees, Expenses & Value,” and the Covenant team was at the conference throughout.
- Legal Geek (October 14–15, London): Richard spoke on "Rethinking Legal Billing: Pricing for Value, Risk and Efficiency," a panel about the evolution of the billable hour.
On The Deal
A profile series on the attorneys building Covenant: career paths that span Kirkland & Ellis, BlackRock, CVC Capital Partners, and private practice across the US and Europe, and what each of them has learned about where private markets legal work is headed now that AI is in the room.
This month: The Better Version, featuring Randy Kaufman, Counsel