Ropes & Gray is Developing AI-Powered Diligence Tool with OpenAI to Deliver Comprehensive Deal Intelligence for Clients

When clients give the green light on a new transaction, the clock starts immediately—and in competitive bid situations, actionable intelligence can't wait until the submission deadline. Traditionally, a comprehensive diligence review has meant waiting days while a team of attorneys works around the clock to assemble findings.

Ropes & Gray is developing a proprietary AI-powered review tool that can produce a detailed, issue-level diligence report in hours, not weeks. But speed is only part of the story. By compressing the time spent assembling findings, the tool could give attorneys more time to do what clients value most—analyze risks, pressure-test deal structures, and deliver strategic counsel that drives deal execution.

The tool is the product of a new collaboration between Ropes & Gray and OpenAI to build custom agentic AI workflows for transactional due diligence. But for clients, what will matter is the result: quality insight and faster access to the analysis that drives decisions, backed by the same tight controls, consistency, privacy, and expert legal judgment clients expect from Ropes & Gray at every step.

The innovation behind this tool is that it is designed to mirror the precise steps the firm's lawyers follow when they dig into a data room: spotting risks, flagging exceptions, and surfacing critical issues earlier in the diligence process. The goal is a repeatable, reliable workflow built around the firm's own review methodology.

"Our clients rely on us for judgment on the deals, disputes, and regulatory challenges that define their industries," said Julie Jones, Chair of Ropes & Gray. "With OpenAI, we are bringing frontier AI to the most time-intensive legal work, starting with transactional due diligence. Our goal is to put our lawyers' insight and experience to work earlier in the process, at greater speed and depth, so our clients get faster execution, sharper analysis, and the industry-leading counsel they expect from Ropes & Gray."

Ropes & Gray has built its AI strategy around a multi-tool architecture that brings together the best AI solutions on the market, deployed by a highly trained workforce of AI-fluent attorneys. The OpenAI collaboration is a milestone within that broader strategy, complementing a robust tech stack designed to keep clients ahead of the market and a workforce built to use those tools effectively.

Every AI deployment at Ropes & Gray operates within an enterprise-grade security framework, with attorney oversight embedded at every stage. It's a model built to scale—and the firm says this is just the beginning.