Ropes & Gray develops OpenAI tool for deal diligence

Ropes & Gray is developing an AI-powered diligence tool with OpenAI for transactional due diligence work.

The proprietary system is being built to produce issue-level diligence reports in hours, rather than after several days of manual review by teams of lawyers.

It is designed to follow the same steps lawyers use when reviewing a transaction data room, including identifying risks, flagging exceptions and surfacing critical issues earlier in the diligence process.

The project is part of a wider collaboration with OpenAI to create custom agentic AI workflows for transactional due diligence. The system is intended to support lawyers by reducing the time spent assembling findings and allowing more time for legal analysis, deal structuring and client advice.

Deal review

Due diligence is a core part of mergers and acquisitions and other transactions, where legal teams assess contracts, liabilities and regulatory issues before a deal proceeds. In competitive bids, speed can affect how quickly advisers identify problems and shape negotiating positions.

The new tool is intended to make early review more repeatable by embedding the firm's methodology in the workflow. Its output will remain subject to lawyer oversight.

"Our clients rely on us for judgment on the deals, disputes, and regulatory challenges that define their industries," said Julie Jones, chair of Ropes & Gray.

"With OpenAI, we are bringing frontier AI to the most time-intensive legal work, starting with transactional due diligence. Our goal is to put our lawyers' insight and experience to work earlier in the process, at greater speed and depth, so our clients get faster execution, sharper analysis, and the industry-leading counsel they expect from Ropes & Gray," Jones said.

AI strategy

The collaboration sits within a broader AI strategy centred on using multiple tools rather than relying on a single platform. Ropes & Gray said it has built what it described as a multi-tool architecture, alongside training for lawyers using those systems.

Each AI deployment operates within a security framework, with attorney oversight embedded at every stage. The firm did not disclose financial terms or a deployment timetable.

Law firms have been experimenting with generative AI across contract review, document summarisation, research and internal knowledge management, but transactional diligence remains a particularly demanding use case because of the volume of documents involved and the need for consistent judgment across large data sets.

By focusing on issue-level reporting, Ropes & Gray appears to be targeting one of the most labour-intensive parts of deal work, where junior and senior lawyers often work in parallel to identify change-of-control clauses, consent requirements, litigation risks and other material points.

The system is intended to deliver faster access to analysis while maintaining privacy, consistency and legal judgment. The OpenAI collaboration marks a milestone in the firm's broader technology strategy.