How a Private Equity House Gained Real-Time Portfolio Visibility

A mid-market private equity firm based in Copenhagen manages a portfolio of twelve companies across the Nordics, DACH region, and Benelux. The fund, raised in 2019 with commitments from Nordic institutional investors and family offices, focuses on industrial and business services companies with enterprise values between fifty and two hundred million euros. Each portfolio company has its own subsidiary structure — some simple, with a single holding entity and operating company, and some sprawling, with intermediate holdings, joint ventures, and dormant entities inherited from previous ownership.

The fund's legal and compliance team — a head of legal, a legal counsel, and a compliance analyst — is responsible for maintaining accurate records of every entity, board composition, and ownership relationship across the entire portfolio. This is not merely an administrative exercise. The fund's limited partnership agreement requires quarterly reporting on the portfolio's corporate structure, and the investors — pension funds and insurance companies subject to their own regulatory requirements — expect the information to be current and precise.

Before Juristic, this information lived in a fragmented ecosystem. Entity details were scattered across local commercial registers in fourteen jurisdictions, law firm correspondence, annual returns filed by local administrators, and a master Excel spreadsheet maintained by the compliance analyst. The spreadsheet had grown to forty-seven tabs and was perpetually out of date. When the fund's investment committee needed a current view of a portfolio company's structure ahead of a board meeting, the legal team would spend days chasing down updates from local counsel in each jurisdiction — sending emails, making phone calls, and reconciling conflicting information. The result was never quite current, and the team knew it.

The breaking point came during the preparation for an annual general meeting with the fund's limited partners. An investor's compliance officer asked for a complete, current overview of every entity across the portfolio, with board compositions and ownership percentages accurate as of the reporting date. The legal team estimated that producing this document — essentially a verified snapshot of the entire portfolio structure — would take two to three weeks of dedicated work. The head of legal, who had joined from a law firm where she had used Juristic on corporate transactions, proposed a different approach.

The migration to Juristic Structure began with the fund's three most complex portfolio companies — those with subsidiaries in six or more jurisdictions. The compliance analyst exported entity data from the master spreadsheet and imported it into Structure. The initial import was imperfect: some ownership percentages were outdated, a few entities had been dissolved but not removed from the spreadsheet, and board compositions were months behind. But the import provided a starting point, and the clean-up process itself was revealing — it forced the team to identify and resolve discrepancies that had been hiding in the spreadsheet for months.

Within two weeks, the three pilot portfolio companies were fully mapped in Structure. The head of legal then invited local counsel in each jurisdiction to access the relevant workspaces as contributors. This was a critical design decision: rather than relying on the fund's team to chase updates, the responsibility for keeping entity information current shifted to the local professionals who were closest to the data. When a German subsidiary appointed a new director, the fund's German counsel updated the entity in Structure directly. When a Dutch holding company's articles of association were amended, the Dutch notary's office uploaded the new document and updated the relevant details.

The model worked because it aligned responsibility with access. Local counsel were not being asked to adopt a new tool for the fund's convenience — they were being given a platform that made their own record-keeping easier. Several local advisors noted that they preferred updating a visual, collaborative workspace to sending email attachments that might or might not be filed correctly at the other end. One firm in Helsinki began using their Structure access as their own reference tool for the portfolio company's Finnish subsidiaries.

The fund's legal team maintained a master workspace that aggregated all twelve portfolio companies into a single view — a dashboard-level overview showing every entity, every jurisdiction, and every board member across the entire portfolio. The investment committee began accessing this view directly before board meetings, replacing the static PowerPoint slides that had previously been prepared by the legal team at considerable cost in time and effort.

The impact on the fund's operational processes was significant. Due diligence on potential add-on acquisitions now begins with the current Structure workspace rather than a data room request. When the fund evaluated an acquisition target for one of its German portfolio companies, the deal team could see the existing subsidiary structure in real time and model how the target would fit into the group before the first management meeting. The head of legal estimated that this visibility saved two to three days at the front end of every add-on process.

Investor reporting, which had been the original pain point, became routine. The quarterly structure reports are now generated from Structure's export functionality: a complete, verified overview of every entity, board member, and ownership relationship across fourteen jurisdictions, produced in hours rather than weeks. The fund's investor relations team noted that the quality and consistency of the reports improved markedly, and that investor questions about structural details — which had previously required days of research — could be answered during the meeting itself.

When the fund completed a secondary sale of one of its portfolio companies — a Nordic business services group with subsidiaries in five countries — the buyer's counsel commented that the quality of the structural documentation was the best they had encountered in a mid-market transaction. The entire vendor due diligence package for the corporate structure, including entity details, board compositions, ownership charts, and inter-company agreements, had been generated from Structure in under an hour. The head of legal noted that producing the same package from the old spreadsheet would have taken a week and would still have required manual verification.

The compliance analyst, whose role had previously been dominated by spreadsheet maintenance and email follow-ups, was freed to focus on substantive compliance work: monitoring regulatory developments across the portfolio's jurisdictions, reviewing anti-money laundering procedures, and supporting the fund's ESG reporting obligations. The head of legal describes this shift as the most important organisational benefit of the migration — not just time saved, but time redirected to work that actually reduces risk.

The head of legal estimates that the team saves roughly two full working days per portfolio company per quarter on structural maintenance alone. Across twelve companies, that amounts to nearly one hundred days per year — the equivalent of half a full-time position. The cost of the Juristic subscription is, by the head of legal's calculation, recovered within the first quarter of each year.

The fund is now preparing to raise its next vehicle, and the Juristic workflow is being written into the operational playbook from the outset. New portfolio companies will be onboarded into Structure within the first month of acquisition, with local counsel access established as part of the post-closing workstream. The head of legal's ambition is that the fund will never again be in a position where it does not know, with confidence and in real time, what its portfolio looks like. 'In private equity,' she observed, 'you would never accept a two-week delay in seeing your financial numbers. Why should the corporate structure be any different?'