#28 Harvey.AI Use Case Study
This week, I share a study conducted by Harvey.AI on the most popular transactional law use cases for its product and a list of M&A AI tools provided by the IMAA.
AI will change the world, but how will it change M&A? I want to focus on AI’s impact on M&A in this newsletter. I am not an expert on either M&A or AI, but I want to learn about both topics and how they intersect. I thought there might be others in my situation (or people who are experts in one field or the other) who would find information on M&A and AI helpful in their careers, so I created this newsletter to track and share what I learn.
Harvey AI Use Cases
Here is a link to a story from Harvey.ai’s website with data on how Harvey is used in law practice.
Here is the chart showing the data they collected on transactional law use cases:
The darker shade of blue shows more frequent use. I will provide some of my takeaways on the results, below.
Drafting
As you can see, almost all of the practice areas use Harvey for drafting. This makes sense and is consistent with some of the ideas we have previously talked about, specifically that AI is good for “creative” tasks. Of course, drafting requires a high level of precision. But with a legally trained AI model like Harvey, I would imagine it could get the language fairly close to correct, allowing the user to refine the provision quickly. If anything, legally trained generative AI will save lawyers time creating a first draft.
Deal Management
“Deal management” gets some fairly substantial use by transactional practice groups according to Harvey. The article gives a short parenthetical definition of deal management as “planning and coordinating processes.” While it’s unclear, I think it means tasks generally reserved for junior lawyers, like checklists, communications, and signature pages. I would be very curious to know how Harvey can assist in deal management.
Does it generate signature pages? It seems like AI should be able to do that fairly easily, depending on the level of detail in the prompt.
Does it update checklists? I’m not sure how that would be super useful, since checklists can be updated fairly easily through manual processes. Perhaps it can create a checklist based on a prompt? That would be very useful, especially for junior lawyers. I would like to see if that is possible with a legally trained gen AI tool. I think there are some fairly obvious problems with how this would work, especially because each firm and each partner probably have a specific way to create a checklist on a pre-determined template.
The most clear-cut “deal management” use case I think of is drafting first drafts of emails to send internally or to clients. Even non-legally trained AI tools can do this, so it is not a far stretch to believe that Harvey has this capability.
Due Dilligence
One surprise from the list is that several practice groups, including private equity, do not heavily use Harvey for due diligence. I know that Harvey can be used to analyze documents, so I am a little surprised it does not get used to analyze some of the documents from due diligence. I think this can be explained by the fact that Harvey is not a due diligence-focused tool. For one, there are several diligence-focused tools that are better suited to assist in diligence tasks (like AI-enabled data rooms that can analyze the entire data room, instead of a few documents at a time). Additionally, most of the hype around AI and M&A has been about automating due diligence, so M&A professionals are likely more aware of diligence-specific tools.
IMAA M&A Tool List
Here is a link to a list of M&A AI tools from the Institute for Mergers, Acquisitions, & Alliances (IMAA). The list contains eight different categories of tools, including cybersecurity, legal, due diligence, strategy, risk assessment, valuation, post-merger integration, and predictive analytics.
Some highlights from the list include:
Kira.ai: I wrote about Kira a while back. Kira is a due diligence tool that assists lawyers in identifying relevant information in data rooms and increases efficiency in due diligence processes.
AlphaSense: This tool helps PE investors identify targets by providing AI search features for its vast database of company data.
BloombergGPT: According to the article, BloombergGPT is “a colossal 50-billion parameter large language model meticulously designed from the ground up to cater to the intricate world of finance.”
The list would be great for someone interested in seeing what AI tools are available for M&A professionals.
About me
My name is Parker Lawter, and I am a law student pursuing a career as an M&A lawyer. I am in my last semester of law school, and with some extra time on my hands, I decided to create this newsletter. I hope it is informative and helpful to anyone who reads it! I am not an expert at either M&A or AI, but I am actively pursuing knowledge in both areas, and this newsletter is a part of that pursuit. I hope you’ll join me!
Follow me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/parker-w-lawter-58a6a41b
All views expressed are my own!