Ropes & Gray Develops AI Tool for Transactional Diligence
Law firm Ropes & Gray is collaborating with OpenAI to build a specialized AI tool that handles data-heavy transactional diligence and automates the first-pass review of commercial contracts.
Radwan AbdulhadiEditor and technology writer
Building an AI Tool for Commercial Contract Diligence
Law firm Ropes & Gray is developing a transactional diligence AI tool in partnership with OpenAI to help legal teams navigate large volumes of documents under tight deadlines. Before finalizing an acquisition, buyers must carry out thorough investigations to validate legal and financial claims, a process that traditionally requires extensive data-heavy research by a team of lawyers.
Parsing through enormous numbers of documents and analyzing patterns to prepare a bid on a short timeline can take days of intensive work. To help lawyers accelerate this workflow, Ropes & Gray collaborated on a dedicated artificial intelligence solution as detailed by [OpenAI News](https://openai.com/index/ropes-gray-ai-diligence/).
Howard Glazer, Partner and Head of Practice AI at Ropes & Gray, notes that clients do not pay the firm to review contracts, but rather to make informed judgments based on the contents. The new tool aims to shift focus away from manual contract parsing toward higher-level legal analysis.
How the Transactional Diligence Tool Operates
The diligence AI tool takes a first pass by combing through thousands of pages of material commercial contracts, identifying relevant files, and automatically grouping them according to underlying themes and issues. Furthermore, the system inventories and categorizes a data room to review complete relationships rather than isolated documents.
Along with structuring the research, the workflow produces summaries and a completed report formatted to Ropes & Gray's standard layout. The tool functions comparably to the work of a capable junior-to-mid-level associate, delivering consistent initial outputs designed to streamline the overall review process.
During the initial development phase, the firm's lawyers compared test outputs directly with human-authored diligence reports from completed deals. They subsequently refined the evaluation rubric and report formats based on accurate drafts and areas where early outputs fell short.
Maintaining Strict Human Oversight and Review
Despite the automation capabilities of the new technology, lawyers remain essential to the final deliverables. Firm leadership emphasizes that every piece of work delivered to a client must be backed completely by legal professionals who inspect the underlying source materials.
Lawyers can easily review interim summaries and actual documents generated by the platform to ensure nothing is missed. With the initial review handled by the AI system, legal teams can dedicate more time to refining the work and crafting careful final judgments.
Ropes & Gray has publicly stated its ambition for the platform to produce a detailed, issue-level diligence report in a matter of hours instead of several weeks, improving overall efficiency alongside other advanced technologies like GPT-6 Astra.
Lessons Learned and Future AI Horizons
The firm's leadership has identified key lessons from adopting artificial intelligence across professional environments. Experimenting with AI across various daily tasks helps practitioners understand its capabilities and limitations, transforming playful experimentation into a powerful professional utility.
Additionally, the firm stresses keeping client success at the forefront of every technological deployment, ensuring that workflow innovations ultimately translate into direct client benefits. For more information on enterprise AI implementations, organizations can visit [Contact sales](https://openai.com/contact-sales/).
Looking ahead, Glazer believes the next stage of artificial intelligence will assist in establishing collective institutional knowledge within the firm. With 340 partners and 1,500 lawyers, Ropes & Gray sees significant value in connecting insights from past projects and client meetings to solve complex problems more effectively.
Sources
- OpenAI NewsHow Ropes & Gray is developing AI for transactional diligence
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