Relativity, a legal technology company, turned to Carta’s LLC platform following an investment from a prominent private equity firm.
Partnering with Carta to manage their employee equity program gave them easier and more detailed reporting, better data, and a more streamlined platform of products and services to support its complex equity structure.
“Carta’s LLC platform made it easy for us to offer a consistent equity experience to our employees around the world,” said Timothy Cha, Relativity’s senior manager for compensation solutions. “My team was also able to more easily track data cleanliness and report out to key stakeholders, when compared to previous platforms.
“We were impressed with the amount of time saved through Carta LLC’s built-in automation, as well as the pace of innovation,” he said.
Private equity investment spurs move to modernize
Cha said an investment by private equity firm Silver Lake acted as an impetus to further modernize Relativity’s equity program.
“We routinely share updates in our board compensation committee meetings,” he said. “Carta LLC made it easy to audit our data and use it as a source of truth when creating these reports. This enabled us to confidently present a complete and accurate picture.”
A core goal of Relativity’s compensation team is to make sure employees receive consistent gross economic value in their compensation, regardless of the tax and legal nuances in their local jurisdictions. In practice, this meant the company wanted to use different equity types for their employees.
“My team is focused on doing right by Relativity’s employees,” Tim said. “That said, our company employs people in eight countries across three continents, which makes things complex. Carta LLC allows us to not only easily operationalize that process, but also offer a consistent and quality experience to our employees, regardless of their location.”
‘Huge time saver’ to manage equity programs
Relativity was also able to manage their complex equity program thanks to the versatility of the Carta LLC platform.
“We have three entities we use to offer three different interest types,” Tim said. “These interest types are different combinations of profit interest units and phantom equity grants. Carta LLC has given us the ability to easily create, manage, and represent all our different entities and interest types.”
Carta LLC also streamlines many of the processes that take up the most time. Customers can generate or share forms automatically, update interest holders easily, and quickly issue hundreds of new grants every quarter.
“One of the huge time savers for us with Carta LLC has been through automatic creation of 83(b) forms, and the ability to distribute our K-1 forms,” Tim said. “That takes tasks off my team’s plate and cuts the amount of time we previously spent in half. The process for updating existing interests and issuing new grants is also seamless, taking away much of the manual work.”
Relativity looks to partner with companies that can grow along with them. “I’ve been really impressed with Carta LLC’s pace of innovation,” Tim said. “With other platforms we’ve felt the features seemed stagnant, but Carta’s team continually responds to our business needs by shipping new technologies.
