The M&A team at Siemens Canada partnered with Blake Cassels & Graydon to test technology alongside legal work done by people. Siemens Canada general counsel Richard Brait chose AI diligence tools on a recent transaction to explore how AI can process work more efficiently. Mr Brait challenged the global legal team to come up options, and chose a healthcare acquisition transaction to run the pilot to test artificial intelligence during a transaction in real time.

Selecting a partner

In choosing counsel for the healthcare deal, Mr Brait made it a requirement that whatever law firm selected would want to pilot some new technologies, and Blakes expressed interest in trying new technologies. Normally, deals for Siemens are done out of Germany or the United States. Because this was a Canadian-based transaction it allowed Mr Brait and assistant general counsel Kathy Orysiuk to pick Canadian external counsel for the deal.

Pilot project

The pilot project included using a document drafting tool for proofreading and checking references and terms, a closing agenda system supporting collaboration on the closing agenda and tools to achieve efficiency in collecting signature pages and creating closing books. They also tested out a few of the leading AI diligence engines and tested those against actual human results. For the document drafting, they used a tool embedded in the word processing system in Microsoft Word that takes away some of the administrative work done by junior lawyers in doing careful checks of documents.