Ropes & Gray Partners With OpenAI on Diligence AI Tool

Law firm Ropes & Gray is developing a transactional diligence AI tool in partnership with OpenAI, starting with commercial contract diligence.

Transactional diligence requires legal teams to review large volumes of documents under tight deadlines before an acquisition is finalized. The firm's tool automatically inventories and categorizes a data room, grouping related documents by themes and issues rather than examining files in isolation. It also generates document summaries and creates a completed report in Ropes & Gray's standard format.

Initial development focuses on material commercial contracts. Ropes & Gray designed the query framework to mirror the steps taken by human legal teams, executing initial reviews, drafting summaries, and performing higher-level reviews. During testing, lawyers compared the draft outputs against human-authored diligence reports from completed transactions to refine the tool's report format and rubric.

The firm publicly stated an ambition for the software to produce detailed, issue-level diligence reports in hours rather than weeks. According to OpenAI, the firm uses both its proprietary diligence tool and GPT-6 Astra on client problems.

Lawyers must review interim summaries and underlying source documents before delivering any finished work to clients. Partner and Head of ERISA Fiduciary Practice Josh Lichtenstein stated that lawyers review everything because the firm needs to stand behind its client deliverables 100%. Partner and Head of Practice AI Howard Glazer noted that clients pay the firm to make legal judgments based on contract contents rather than for the contract review process itself.

Glazer said he believes the next stage of AI will help create collective knowledge within the firm. With 340 partners and 1,500 lawyers, Ropes & Gray sees value in giving access to knowledge from client meetings and past projects.