Deal Stage

DealStage is a productivity tool for law firms whose clients are primarily transactional in nature : investment banks, private equity firms, venture capital firms & commercial banks. DealStage’s primary function is to simplify the process of closing deals by helping lawyers organize documents & signature pages into a visual workflow. This workflow takes the form of a grid with documents on one axis and signatories on another. In a typical deal, various combinations of signatories need to sign different combinations of documents — a process that is managed & coordinated by lawyers from 2 or more law firms; typically, there are at least two law firms — one on each side of the transaction.

In DealStage, this process is facilitated through interactions with the Deal Matrix (i.e., the grid) : lawyers from both firms can upload signature pages to cells in the Deal Matrix that correspond to the correct document & signatory. In addition to a visual data store, the Deal Matrix is also a medium of collaboration: lawyers can “flag” cells, add comments to signature pages, upload new versions, and manipulate uploaded assets.

Since this is an enterprise application to be delivered on Software-as-a-service model, security and stability were the key criterion for choosing the right framework was very important for this custom application development. Symfony was found to be appropriate from all respects.