AI-assisted drafting for M&A lawyers
AI-assisted drafting for M&A lawyers addresses one of the most document-intensive and time-compressed workflows in transactional practice. A corporate acquisition involves dozens of documents, multiple counterparty counsel teams, compressed timetables and the constant risk that a defined terms inconsistency or an unreviewed schedule will cause a problem at completion.
Where the time goes on a deal
On a typical acquisition, the legal team's document work can be divided into two broad categories. The first is structural drafting: producing the principal transaction documents (SPA, disclosure letter, board minutes, ancillary agreements) from firm precedents and configuring them for the specific deal. The second is reactive work: reviewing the counterparty's markup, identifying departures from the firm's positions, tracking issues across rounds and producing clean versions for successive exchange.
Both categories are time-consuming, and both are materially affected by AI-assisted drafting. The structural work is faster because the first draft draws from well-organised precedents rather than requiring a document to be assembled from scratch. The reactive work is faster because the counterparty markup review is accelerated by automatic identification of changes that depart from the firm's standard positions.
Issue tracking across rounds
One of the most underappreciated workflow problems in M&A practice is maintaining a clear record of positions across multiple negotiation rounds. As a deal progresses, positions shift, concessions are made and new issues arise. Keeping an accurate picture of what has been agreed, what is still open and what the firm's fallback position is on each outstanding issue requires careful management that is easy to do poorly under time pressure.
AI-assisted negotiation intelligence that tracks positions round by round and identifies where the current draft departs from previous agreed positions reduces the risk that something important is conceded by accident in a late-round markup.
Working within Microsoft Word
M&A document work is done in Microsoft Word, which is also where tracked changes, comment threads and version management happen. A tool that operates inside Word rather than requiring documents to be exported to a separate environment preserves the existing workflow and does not require a change in the fundamental mechanics of how deal teams work. Scriptum is built for this. To see how it works on the document types your team handles, book a demo and we can demonstrate with a live example.