Extract from Louis Lehot’s article, “What Cross-Border M&A Teaches About the Limits of Legal AI.”
Compressing the middle of a process does not eliminate the work that surrounds it. It moves that work to the two ends, and those ends are where legal AI is least useful. Cross-border technology M&A makes the point as well as any practice I know.
For two years, the legal technology conversation has turned on a single premise, that artificial intelligence can read a contract. It can.
In due diligence, where the review of hundreds or thousands of agreements once set the cost and the calendar, a well-pointed model now does in an afternoon what a team of associates needed two weeks to finish. The most labor-intensive phase of diligence has become, for practical purposes, nearly free.
The temptation is to treat that as the whole victory. In my experience it is not. Compressing the middle of a process does not eliminate the work that surrounds it. It moves that work to the two ends, and those ends are where legal AI is least useful. Cross-border technology M&A makes the point as well as any practice I know.
