Before this past year, I had never used an AI tool in my legal practice. Of course, I had read about it in the news like everyone else – at times it seemed to be the only thing anyone was talking about, but I had spent most of my career as an mergers and acquisitions (M&A) lawyer working the way M&A lawyers have always worked. That usually meant a great deal of careful reading by enterprise legal teams.
So, when an opportunity came through Axiom’s AI Tech+Talent solution to support a client's due diligence project, combining senior legal talent with AI-enabled workflows and specialist support, I said yes, in part because I was genuinely curious to see what the technology could do. I came away convinced that the right combination of legal judgment, AI technology, and workflow experience fundamentally changes what a lawyer can realistically offer a client. In Axiom’s model, AI supports that judgment by reducing the cost and time constraints that used to put certain kinds of legal work out of reach. It also opens the door to projects clients always wanted but could not previously justify.
What AI-enabled legal due diligence actually means
For me, AI legal due diligence comes down to using the right technology, guided by experienced lawyers and AI specialists, to read through a large set of contracts and answer specific questions about them. In a typical M&A deal, due diligence means working through a data room full of unstructured documents, everything from commercial contracts and real estate leases to financial statements and tax filings, and manual review of all this is slow and expensive. AI tools built on natural language processing and machine learning can read that volume far faster than a person ever could, and the better AI tools for this purpose are trained specifically for legal work.
For this client project, Axiom used Legora, one of the AI tools available within Axiom’s broader AI-enabled delivery model, because it was well suited to the client’s specific diligence and contract review needs. My project was a review of a large set of agreements that came with a target company in the M&A context, with Axiom coordinating the AI-enabled workflow and legal delivery model, and with tool-specific support from a Legora AI specialist to help manage the document set, refine prompts, and scale the review efficiently. The client had hundreds of agreements, each with myriad obligations buried inside them, and what they wanted to know, essentially, was which of those obligations actually mattered.
That is contract review and contract analysis of a kind that has always been possible in theory, but rarely attempted in practice, at least not at this scale. In the past, a senior lawyer would point a team at the documents and then wait for the result . After the initial result failed to satisfy, the senior lawyer would give the team additional instructions and send them back at it. What has changed is that Axiom can now help clients complete the document review portion of this process dramatically faster, at a fraction of the cost, while still keeping an experienced lawyer in control of the analysis. In practice, the process can feel less like using a standalone tool and more like managing an AI-enabled legal team. As with junior associates in a traditional diligence review, I could ask the tool a focused question, review the response, identify when an answer did not look right, and send it back with refined instructions, with a Legora AI specialist helping improve the prompt and output, within Axiom’s broader Tech+Talent delivery model. That is the real value of AI-enabled diligence: not technology for its own sake, but faster, more scalable legal analysis backed by experienced lawyers.
Where AI fits in the M&A deal lifecycle
Most people picture due diligence as something that happens before a deal closes, when you are studying a target company and trying to understand what you are buying, and whether the transaction makes sense. This particular project was different. It was a backward-looking review of a transaction that had already closed a few years earlier.
That backward-looking angle is where Axiom’s AI-enabled approach opens up something genuinely new. Companies rarely revisit deal-related transaction documents after closing. The acquirer tends to move on and hope everything works out. This client, however, was well aware of an important approaching deadline, and they knew that material obligations were sitting in those agreements that had to be performed by specific dates. What the client did not know for certain was which documents contained the truly important obligations, or what, exactly, those obligations were.
With AI-enabled review led by Axiom legal talent and supported by vetted AI tools selected for the specific use case, you can give a company a sort of checkup on its legal health. Are you meeting the key obligations these agreements require? Has anything slipped through the cracks? Those are questions most clients would have loved to have answered in the past but could not justify the time and cost of investigating.
The benefits of AI for M&A due diligence
The clearest benefit of AI Tech+Talent is that work which used to be out of reach becomes possible. An in-house counsel looking at a project like ours used to weigh the budget against the timeline and conclude it simply could not be done. Now it can.
The rest of the benefits follow from that: the diligence process moves faster, costs less, and scales more effectively, while an experienced M&A lawyer remains accountable for the analysis. For this client, the deliverable was a clear table that set out exactly what they needed: which obligations truly matter and what they should focus on as applicable deadlines approached. A project like that would have been a real challenge using a traditional review model. With Axiom’s AI-supported workflow, we were able to complete it in a very short timeframe.
The legal teams pulling ahead pair AI investment with disciplined execution and legal judgment.
Why enterprise legal teams need AI-enabled contract review
The teams that gain the most from this are enterprise in-house legal departments, especially those facing large contract populations, limited internal bandwidth, and business-critical questions buried in legacy agreements. A general counsel or assistant general counsel usually has a long list of things they would like to know about their contracts and very little time or budget to chase any of those questions down. They would like to be confident that all of their documents are in order and that there are no unexpected provisions sitting in agreements nobody has read in years. Before AI, that was the kind of project that got tabled indefinitely.
My own role has not changed much, which is an important point for clients. AI does not remove the need for experienced legal judgment; it gives that judgment more reach. Most of what I do is talk to the general counsel or assistant general counsel, gain an understanding of what the business actually needs, and work out how to deliver it. Axiom’s AI-enabled solution provides the “how” in that process: the right combination of lawyer, tool, workflow, and AI expertise to get the client to the answer faster. I still spend my time understanding the client’s concerns and turning them into the analysis they are looking for, whatever the document type in front of me.
Why the Axiom AI Tech+Talent model matters
Choosing the software is only part of the job. The real value comes from knowing how to pair the right tool with the right legal talent, workflow, and quality-control process. As with any tool, you have to know how to use it, and I came to this project having never touched Legora before. What made it work was the way Axiom’s Tech+Talent model paired my M&A experience with AI-enabled workflows and tool-specific support from Legora, combining senior legal judgment with the technical workflow support needed to make the project successful. In other words, Axiom helped operationalize AI for real legal work, rather than leaving the client or the lawyer to manage another standalone tool.
Another key to our success was that the project was supported by a Legora AI specialist, who helped with the tool-specific work that should not sit solely with the reviewing lawyer in an AI-enabled project: document upload, workflow setup, prompt refinement, process design, and coordination with the client. That support began with uploading hundreds of documents into the system and coordinating with the client, but it continued throughout the review. More importantly, he stayed with me throughout the project. It’s amazing how the slightest tweak to a prompt can produce a completely different result, and when an answer didn’t look quite right to me, a Legora AI specialist helped adjust the prompt, test the output, and refine the tool workflow until we landed where we needed to be. We tested a small set of the documents first, got the prompts into a shape that seemed to be working, and only then ran the full set of hundreds of documents. That staged approach — test, validate, scale — is critical to responsible AI-enabled legal work.
Verification of the results is where my legal experience mattered most. I would insert a prompt, and the AI tool, Legora, would return an answer along with an explanation of how it reached its conclusions. One of the genuinely useful features of the tool is that I can click straight through to the provision in the document that the answer relied on, read that provision for myself in real time, and decide whether the answer holds up. If it does not, we tweak the prompt and try again. That feedback loop, with a lawyer reading the actual contract language and exercising legal judgment, is what gives me and the client comfort that the results are accurate to a reasonable degree. That is the balance Axiom’s AI Tech+Talent is designed to strike: technology accelerates the work, while experienced lawyers remain responsible for judgment, context, and risk.
No tool gets it right every time, and – as much as we may hate to admit it – every lawyer should know that 100 percent accuracy is not achievable. Part of my job is talking with the client about their risk tolerance and then demonstrating that the AI-enabled review process was able to produce a very good level of accuracy. I served as the liaison between the client and the process, applying my own judgment to be confident the answer was good enough for the client’s needs. That risk assessment is something that can only be done well by a person, and it is one of the things that sets an experienced lawyer apart.
I have worked with Axiom for more than a decade, and what keeps me here is the chance to drop into a number of different companies, become part of the in-house team for a defined period, and dive into work I find genuinely interesting. This project added something new on top of that. It was the first time I had worked alongside another Axiom professional in this kind of AI-enabled delivery model, and the collaboration between Axiom’s legal talent and the Legora AI specialist was both effective for the client, and, frankly, fun. I could not be more pleased with how it turned out, and I would not have felt comfortable stepping into an AI tool like this without that support beside me. That pairing — Axiom’s Legal Talent bench strength, senior M&A experience, and AI delivery expertise — is what made the project successful, and it is the core value of the company’s AI Tech+Talent solution: AI-enabled legal execution built around judgment, workflow, and measurable client outcomes.
FAQ
What is AI-enabled M&A due diligence?
AI for M&A due diligence is the use of AI tools, often trained specifically on legal documents, to review the contracts and agreements involved in a merger or acquisition and answer questions about them. In Axiom’s model, the tool is paired with experienced legal talent, AI-enabled workflows, and tool-specific support where needed. Lawyers remain responsible for legal judgment and verification, while specialists can help refine prompts, configure the tool workflow, and support efficient review.
How does AI improve legal due diligence in M&A transactions?
It compresses time and cost. A review of several hundred agreements that once took a very long time and was prohibitively expensive can now be completed quickly and affordably, which may make some projects feasible for the first time. It also allows legal departments to revisit contract populations, identify key obligations, and surface risks that may previously have gone unreviewed because of budget or timing constraints.
Can AI replace lawyers during M&A due diligence?
No. The AI tool produces a first answer, but a lawyer still has to read the underlying provisions, apply judgment, and decide whether the answer is acceptable for the client’s risk tolerance. Judgment drives the work. The tool speeds it up. That is why Axiom’s approach pairs AI-enabled technology with experienced lawyers and AI specialists rather than treating software as a standalone solution.
What types of contracts can AI review during an acquisition?
A tool trained on legal documents can review the full range of agreements and licenses that come with a company in an M&A context, alongside other contracts typically found in a deal. In this project, that meant hundreds of agreements and ancillary documents containing myriad obligations.
How accurate is AI contract review in M&A due diligence?
Accuracy is good when the work is set up properly, but it is never 100 percent, and no responsible lawyer would claim otherwise. Accuracy depends on careful prompting, testing on a small document set first, and a lawyer verifying answers against the source provisions. That combination of workflow design and lawyer verification is central to Axiom’s AI-enabled delivery model.
What are the benefits of using AI for M&A due diligence?
Speed, lower cost, and scale. AI makes it possible to analyze a large body of contracts and surface the obligations that genuinely matter, including for backward-looking reviews that companies could not previously justify. With Axiom’s AI Tech+Talent solution, clients also benefit from workflow design, prompt refinement, lawyer verification, and risk-based legal judgment.
What challenges should organizations consider when using AI for legal due diligence?
You need someone who knows how to use the AI tool well, a plan to test prompts before scaling, and a lawyer in the loop to verify results and weigh risk tolerance. AI handles the volume. People handle the judgment. The most successful projects combine technology, legal experience, and AI delivery expertise from the start.
Axiom’s AI Tech+Talent solution brings together experienced lawyers, AI-enabled workflows, and tool-specific expertise to help legal departments complete diligence and contract review projects at a speed, scale, and cost that used to be out of reach. Talk to us about your next project.