How Ropes & Gray is developing AI for transactional diligence
Ropes & Gray and OpenAI are building an AI tool to automate initial transactional diligence, reducing document review time from weeks to hours while maintaining lawyer oversight.
Ropes & Gray, a law firm with a history of early AI adoption, is collaborating with OpenAI to develop a proprietary AI tool for transactional diligence. The tool aims to streamline the labor-intensive process of reviewing large volumes of documents under tight deadlines, which typically requires extensive manual effort by legal teams. By automating the first pass of document analysis, the tool helps lawyers focus on higher-value judgment tasks rather than routine contract review.
The AI tool processes thousands of pages, identifying relevant documents and grouping them by themes and issues. It generates summaries and a completed report in Ropes & Gray’s standard format, while also categorizing the entire data room to review relationships between documents. Lawyers retain the ability to inspect and adjust the tool’s groupings and categorizations to ensure accuracy before finalizing any report.
During development, Ropes & Gray’s lawyers tested the tool’s outputs against human-authored diligence reports from completed deals. They refined the tool’s rubric and report format based on where the AI drafts succeeded or fell short, ensuring the tool mimics the firm’s established review process. The result is a tool that performs at the level of a capable junior-to-mid-level associate, providing a consistent first pass through the diligence process.
The firm’s ambition is for the tool to produce a detailed, issue-level diligence report in hours rather than weeks. Ropes & Gray emphasizes that lawyers still review all interim summaries and source documents before delivering final work to clients, maintaining the firm’s commitment to quality and accountability. The tool is part of a broader effort to leverage AI to solve client problems more efficiently.