The Better Version
Randy Kaufman came up inside a fund formation practice at a moment when the old rules of legal work were already starting to bend. He joined Covenant 14 months ago and hasn't looked back. Here's what practicing law looks like when you build it from the start with AI in the room.
Why this work
Early in his career, the message was consistent: certain work was where the action was — the clients, the volume, the institutional momentum. LP side work, to the extent it came up at all, was positioned as the lesser path.
Randy Kaufman didn't fully buy it. Not because he had a strong conviction about LP side work, but because something about the logic felt off. "They push this notion that the GP side is like the better work," he says. "But I've found the opposite to be true."
In 13 months advising LPs, he's been exposed to the mechanics, strategy, and approach of hundreds of fund managers across strategies and vintages. "I've seen more at Covenant in a comparative blip than I did in my entire career before," he says. "You can't hope to be as well-rounded when half your legal career is answering to two or three managers."
Two different worlds
Having practiced on both the sponsor and investor side, Randy has a specific view of how differently the same negotiation feels depending on where you sit.
"On the sponsor side, it feels like there's this inevitable connotation of trying to win," he says. "On the LP side, it really feels like there's more of the spirit of: this is a partnership. The goal is to come out with a fund document that provides the highest alignment of interest." Not partnership as a legal form, he says, but as an actual operating principle–one that shapes how he approaches a deal from the first read of a document to the final call with opposing counsel.
That orientation shapes everything about how he approaches a deal, and it's one of the reasons Covenant's model appealed to him. Working exclusively for investors means the work is always pointed in the same direction.
What AI actually changes
At Covenant, the platform sits at the center of how Randy works and what he actually does with his time.
Fund reviews that used to absorb hours of manual extraction—term by term, interrupted by other client demands, picked back up days later with the attendant re-acclimation cost—now move in a fraction of the time. The platform generates the review. Randy uses it as a launching point for what matters: preparing for the call with opposing counsel, applying terms to an active negotiation, delivering something more focused and specific than a document covered in extracted data points.
"An attorney might pick up a review on a Monday, bill three hours, then something hits the fan and they can't look at it again until Friday," he says of the traditional model. "By the time they return, the re-acclimation cost alone eats into the quality of the work."
What replaces the grind is what becomes possible once it's gone. "I spend so much more time doing the important things, what clients really only need five-to-ten percent of the time."
The result, counterintuitively, is more client contact rather than less. "You might assume an AI-powered firm means less human interaction," he says. "It's actually the opposite. There's more time for clients now. They're getting a better version of Randy."
Getting better
The learning process, Randy says, isn't as different as you might expect except in one key way: access.
"At a big law firm, you can't just lob questions to your superiors all day," he says. "You need to learn a lot on your own." The hierarchy is real, and so is the time pressure on the people at the top of it. Junior attorneys absorb what they can, when they can.
At Covenant, because the time-consuming work is handled by the platform, that dynamic changes. "Richard Perris, Covenant's co-founder and former General Counsel of CVC Capital Partners, has more time to pay attention to my questions," Randy says. "And just being on these calls is the difference maker in and of itself. Our entire legal team could get on a call and a client would not need to worry about paying for extra resources." The exposure compounds, which is what he's found actually drives development as a lawyer.
What comes next
What changes most, in his view, is what it means to be a good lawyer. The measure is shifting from volume to judgment. "Whether you were good or not was based off your number," he says of traditional practice. At Covenant, the standard is different. "I'm judged based off the comments I make on a fund document, whether they're intellectually sound, whether they make sense."
That shift is already underway, and the legal industry knows it. On his way out of his previous firm, one of the few questions Randy was asked in his exit interview was how much he felt the work was just paper pushing. "They know it's a problem," he says. "But at this point, it's a cog in the machine that cannot be removed."
Fund formation, in his view, is uniquely exposed. "The inputs required for fund work are just so document heavy, requiring so little legal substantive knowledge, that it is just ideal for tech to swoop in." The firms building around that reality rather than around it are the ones that will define what comes next.
"Five years ago, your value may have hinged on your ability to do grunt work at a blazing pace," he says. "In the future, the best lawyers will distinguish themselves by their performance on that call."
