How Ropes & Gray is developing AI for transactional diligence

In transactional diligence, lawyers need to work through large volumes of documents under tight deadlines. Ropes & Gray was an early adopter of AI in the legal industry, and in partnership with OpenAI, they are now developing a proprietary AI tool to provide more expertise to more clients.

“AI is really one of the key ways—if not the only way—to make sure you can maintain the same quality and consistency of advice while moving at a faster pace.”

—Josh Lichtenstein, Partner and Head of ERISA Fiduciary Practice, Ropes & Gray

Building a first pass for commercial contract diligence

Before finalizing any acquisition, the buyer must carry out a thorough investigation to validate the seller’s financial and legal claims. That process of transactional diligence uncovers risks and liabilities, requiring data-heavy research that usually involves an entire team of lawyers.

From parsing through an enormous number of documents to analyzing patterns, putting together a bid on a short timeline can take days of intensive work. To help their lawyers help their clients move more quickly, Ropes & Gray developed a transactional diligence AI tool with OpenAI.

“It’s enabling all the lawyers at our firm to actually get to what we’re supposed to be doing,” says Howard Glazer, the Partner and Head of Practice AI at Ropes & Gray. “Our clients don’t pay us to review contracts. They pay us to make judgments based on what’s in the contracts.”

The new diligence AI tool takes a first pass by combing through thousands of pages, identifying relevant documents and automatically grouping them together based on themes and issues. Along with the research, the tool produces summaries and a completed report in Ropes & Gray’s signature format. It inventories and categorizes a data room, so it can review full relationships, not isolated documents. Of course, lawyers can inspect the grouping and categorization to confirm nothing is missed.