Insights from the latest ABA Technology in M&A Subcommittee meeting – where are recent innovations taking us?

The ABA Business Law Section recently held its Fall Meeting in Toronto, at which I chaired a meeting of the ABA Technology in M&A Subcommittee. 

As usual, there were a wide range of fascinating insights coming out of the meeting relating to innovation in M&A, the tools available (or soon to be available) on the market, and where the future might take us in terms of how they are used in deals.

Highlights included:

Josephine Kenny, Director, Client Value & Innovation at Litera, gave us a sneak preview of how Kira’s generative AI and Lito, Litera’s agentic AI, together enhance M&A workflows beyond diligence. Some of the features we saw are not yet generally released in the market and I think that their "smart fields" feature – effectively small language models trained to identify data points – could significantly impact the M&A process going forwards.

Andrew Johnston, Strategic Business Development Manager at Harvey demonstrated the latest version of the Harvey platform, with particular reference to how it can be used in M&A. They last presented to our Subcommittee around 18 months ago and our Firm recently signed up with them as the product has moved forward hugely since then, something that was confirmed by…

...Cheryl Wilson Griffin a Legal Tech expert with LegalTech Hub, who gave us a preview of the results of their comparative study on the leading Due Diligence tools currently available in the market. They revealed that the study was expected to show, for example, that Harvey and Legora (better known in Europe than in the US) have been promoted into the study's ‘Tier 1’. 

Thomas Romer, who's my Vice Chair at the Technology in M&A Committee and who jumped out of a successful career as an M&A partner in a leading US law firm to become a co-founder and CEO of a legaltech business, Dexterity, demonstrated Dexterity’s amazing deal intelligence platform. I think that everyone in the room was sold on how the platform, which pulls together actionable deal info via a simple dashboard, can generate huge time savings on transactions. 

Erica Gann Kitaev of Thomson Reuters gave an update on the recently launched CoCounsel Legal, which integrates with Westlaw’s agentic deep research offering as well as new expert guided workflows. A key feature here is that this is all powered by Practical Law’s trusted, curated content and so for example their redlines include AI-generated explanations for changes and links to the relevant Practical Law content. 

As always, it was great to catch up at the meeting with colleagues (many of whom have become good friends) from all over the world and kudos to M&A Committee Chair Rita-Anne O'Neill and her co-chairs Jenny Hochenberg, Charlotte May and Jessica Pearlman for organising such a great M&A track overall at the BLS meeting. Kudos also to my colleague and senior associate in our Corporate team, Nathan Lightman, who took a full part (including in presentations) at what was only his second only M&A Committee meeting.

It is fascinating to watch technology in M&A change and evolve and start to see the benefits these innovations offer in the way we handle transactions for our clients. It is equally fascinating to see new tools teased or unveiled which promise to offer greater benefits still. 

It really is the most exciting time in history to be an M&A lawyer, and no doubt there will be a raft of new announcements and teasers at the next Technology in M&A Subcommittee. We look forward to reporting on them in due course.