AI Reads Thousands of Pages First: Ropes & Gray's Take on Transactional Diligence
Hi, it's Shii-chan! Today I'm sharing a story about AI at work in the legal world!
OpenAI News
openai.com
What was announced?
OpenAI News features a case study of the law firm Ropes & Gray, which is developing AI for transactional diligence together with OpenAI.
Why it matters
In diligence, buyers verify a seller's financial and legal claims by reviewing large volumes of documents, often on short deadlines. Preparing a bid can take days of intensive work across a team of lawyers.
What changes
The firm's proprietary tool does the following:
- Makes a first pass through thousands of pages and finds relevant documents
- Groups documents by theme and issue
- Inventories and categorizes an entire data room so lawyers can see relationships between documents
- Produces summaries and a completed report in the firm's standard format
Lawyers can inspect the groupings and categorizations to confirm nothing was missed, so they can focus on judgment rather than contract review.
Dive Deep
Here is how it was built:
- The work started with material commercial contracts
- Lawyers compared the tool's test outputs with human-written reports from completed deals
- The rubric and report format were refined along the way
- The workflow mirrors the steps a team would take, from initial review to summaries to higher-level analysis
For quality control, lawyers review everything before delivery. The firm must stand behind all client work, so the tool makes it easy to check interim summaries and source documents.
The firm has said it aims to produce detailed, issue-level diligence reports in hours instead of weeks. The article says that, using this tool along with GPT-6 Astra, the firm now solves client problems much faster.
Two leadership lessons:
- Experiment broadly: learning from AI's mistakes turned it from a toy into a professional tool
- Keep clients first: keep asking how AI can benefit clients
Looking ahead, the firm wants to make knowledge from its 340 partners and 1,500 lawyers accessible across the firm.
Wrap-up
- Ropes & Gray built a diligence AI tool with OpenAI
- It supports categorization, grouping, summaries, and standard-format reports
- Lawyers review interim summaries and source documents before delivery
- The goal is hours instead of weeks
This is a good read if you're curious how AI fits into professional work!
