Four years ago, when Luigi Testa first joined LinkSquares as CFO, the Boston-area tech firm employed roughly 40 people. Today, with nearly 400 employees, the company is concerned less with growth and more about achieving a balance between growth and efficiency. To achieve this, LinkSquares management has made automation and AI adoption a priority.
Read MoreAccording to Testa, the goal was to first identify repetitive and manual tasks that could be automated to reduce the need for hiring additional personnel. This is an approach that makes financial processes more sustainable in the long run, he points out, while also helping to control expenses.
Testa also notes that within the finance function, various routine tasks like billing, payment collection, and payroll processing were ripe for automation and AI implementation. Yet, while these new approaches could handle approximately 75% of these tasks, he emphasized the ongoing importance of human oversight to ensure accuracy and relevance.
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CFOTL: Tell us about LinkSquares … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Testa: Our mission is to be the best legal tech company on the planet. We can serve the legal function of every company, regardless of what industry it’s in. If you take a step back and think about G&A—where legal sits—it’s probably the most underfunded part of every business. It’s a cost center. It’s not a revenue-generating center like sales or marketing. Because of this, folks who live in G&A are at a disadvantage in comparison to their peers in sales and marketing, where a lot of investment is made because they’re revenue-generating. They have tons of tools and widgets and things that they use to all themselves to go faster and be more efficient.
Read MoreLegal doesn’t have these today, which is why LinkSquares exists. We are helping legal counsel, legal operations, and anybody who works in a legal function to make their parts of the business faster and their jobs more efficient. This actually takes them away from being very tactical, in the weeds, and putting out fires all day and allows them to be really strategic. This is one of our platforms, a dedicated tool that legal teams use to do really simple things.
For example, if you had 20,000 contracts and wanted to know how many of them in Ohio that were expiring in December 2024 had force majeure language, how would you find this out? You’d have to read every contract, right? Our tool does things like this in seconds.
It’s pretty low-level work. In some cases, it’s just Control-F and finding key terms. At its core, these are the kinds of things that LinkSquares does for customers, and we use it, too. It’s been phenomenally helpful, even in the finance function. We have contract assembly, for instance. Say that you want to create a contract. How do you do it? We have a contract signature tool. We also have aids for understanding what’s in already-executed contracts, as well as project management for legal teams.
Legal teams get tons of requests all day long. How do you manage them? How do you prioritize them? Who knows what’s working? Who knows who’s working on what? All of this is really important, and it’s why we exist—to allow legal teams to go faster and to eliminate bottlenecks. If you think about a legal team or the legal function within a company, you understand that every major decision at some point has to go through legal. The goal of LinkSquares is to make their processes totally more efficient. jb
“Patience, resilience, and appreciation are key. Be patient, understanding that progress in a business takes time and that incremental improvements over time accumulate to big wins. Be resilient and realize that any adversity that you’re facing is part of the journey that you’re on. Appreciate the people you work with and what they are doing, the journey you’re on, and your achievements.” –Luigi Testa, CFO, LinkSquares
LinkSquares | www.linksquares.com | Boston, MA