How VetCor Streamlines a High Volume of Acquisitions

Challenge: Navigate a major merger while managing the daily volume of acquisitions for a growing business

VetCor is one of the premier veterinary services providers in the United States and Canada. At the heart of their business model is growth – specifically, acquisitions, and lots of them. To achieve their mission of preserving community-based, locally managed veterinary practices, VetCor continues to rapidly expand their impressive network of 800+ practices across the United States and Canada. VetCor’s growth objectives include an acquisition target exceeding 100 acquisitions closed annually, which amounts to a lot of work for the legal team.

“Our team is small but nimble, and we’re responsible for handling 99% of our acquisitions in-house,” said John Prindiville, senior corporate counsel for VetCor. “It’s a considerable amount of paperwork for our team to process, and that’s why we began looking for solutions that could assist us in maximizing the efficiency of our document review and drafting.”

The true tipping point, said Prindiville, was when VetCor merged with a competitor and identified the potential risk of having conflicting documents in the marketplace.

“We realized that it was a very good time for us to deploy some new technology to try to map things over and standardize our documents as we go out into the market as a new, unified brand,” Prindiville said.

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Solution: Accelerate document review and drafting without leaving Microsoft Word

Even before the VetCor legal team determined they needed a technology solution, Prindiville regularly received sales pitches for various products, but he wasn’t convinced. The well-established products on the market didn’t offer the kind of tailored solution that addressed the team’s needs.

What attracted Prindiville to Bloomberg Law Contract Solutions was the fact that while it was a new product, the developers came from a place of deep knowledge and understanding of the contract workflow challenges impacting in-house counsel.

“They understood from the minute that we met them what our needs were and how to address them,” Prindiville said.

He was also excited about the opportunity to provide input into the product’s development from the start.

“We feel like our input is valued,” he said of working with the Bloomberg Law product development team. “We’re thrilled that each time we provide our feedback, the team takes that back to the developers and they’re building things that are going to be useful to us.”

The stand-out functionality of the product from Prindiville’s point of view is the effortless integration with Microsoft Word. For example, the instant access to the company’s clause library, as well as clauses from millions of publicly available contracts, and the ability to compare or find similar clauses without having to leave Word.

“Most attorneys will tell you that they are in Word all day, every day, regardless of what line of trade they’re in,” Prindiville said. “It’s been very helpful for us to be able to have one window open with a particular document and to be able to work within that atmosphere. It does save a considerable amount of time.”

Another common challenge for the VetCor team when reviewing or editing a clause is understanding how similar language was handled in the past. Work that previously required a significant amount of time is now as simple as a single click in Contract Solutions.

“The way that Bloomberg Law Contract Solutions uses AI in the clause identification tool is very helpful for our team because the tool removes the guesswork of determining whether there is a modification to our agreement that requires our full attention,” said Prindiville.

Watch: VetCor’s Senior Corporate Counsel, John Prindiville, shares how his team streamlined their acquisitions work with Contract Solutions. [0:39]