Ropes & Gray Develops Deal Due Diligence AI With OpenAI; Lawyers Do the Review
AI collects and organizes deal documents, then drafts summaries and reports. Before any advice goes to the client, a lawyer checks the work.
On October 29, OpenAI said it is working with the law firm Ropes & Gray to build an AI tool for deal due diligence. Due diligence is the painstaking review of documents that precedes a transaction such as an acquisition or an investment. The case OpenAI described puts AI to work at the stage where legal advice is being prepared.
A lawyer’s review is built into the workflow. The AI gathers scattered documents, organizes them, and produces summaries and reports; a lawyer then checks that output before advising the client. In other words, a legal professional screens the work before any advice reaches the client.
The goal, OpenAI said, is to speed up the work while preserving the quality and consistency of the advice. Two things are worth watching from here: how much the AI reduces the time spent reviewing documents in practice, and what standards will be used to judge the quality of the resulting advice.