The development of legal AI tools has accelerated over the past two years, but for individual practice area work such as M&A and competition law, tech to support coordination has failed to keep pace, according to leading European firms and in-house teams.
A report by The Global Legal Post, produced in association with LexisNexis, found that while transaction teams are increasingly using AI for deal work in relation to drafting and document review, lawyers are still primarily relying on manual processes to manage cross-border deal coordination.
This manual workload is also being complicated by an increasingly complex antitrust environment, with a single transaction often requiring multiple regulatory filings across jurisdictions.
The report – Bridging the competition law gap: How Europe’s lawyers are keeping cross-border deals aligned across teams, regulators and jurisdictions – is based on interviews with senior lawyers in countries including Germany, Spain, Italy and Portugal.
Coordination matters because poor deal alignment across firms and in-house teams can end up costing a transaction time, money or certainty.
“One delay can push back the whole deal timetable and put financing at risk,” said Charis Xiourouppa, head of Caselex at LexisNexis. “A missed filing can bring fines or a review after the deal has closed.”
Lawyers are hopeful that, while AI has so far been focused on more general legal tasks, the next phase of tech development will solve practice area-specific challenges, including modernising cross-border deal coordination.
“The industry has focused a lot on what AI can write, because that’s easy to demo, but in cross-border competition work, the valuable problem is not writing; it is orchestration and keeping facts consistent across a number of filings,” said Juan Jiménez-Laiglesia, a competition partner at Pérez-Llorca in Spain.
Some in-house lawyers believe that AI tools will support better coordination with local counsel when working on cross-border deals.
“In-house teams will have more interaction with local counsel than we do at the moment because what AI’s been really good at is breaking down the barriers to communication,” said Rob Beazley, general counsel for Europe at GFG Alliance. “So we expect in the future there will be much more day-to-day interaction with local legal teams, which can help speed up some of the processes and potentially achieve some cost savings by requiring smaller teams at the coordinating law firm level.”
Some lawyers also believe that in the future, AI-powered coordination tools that provide a shared, real-time view on a deal’s status could potentially streamline the transaction process and reduce delays.
“The firms and in-house teams that adopt this first will have a genuine competitive advantage: faster response times, fewer surprises and more credible timeline commitments to boards and regulators,” said Francesco Anglani, a competition partner at Italian firm BonelliErede.
The full list of participants (in alphabetical order)
Francesco Anglani, partner, BonelliErede
Rob Beazley, general counsel, Europe, GFG Alliance
Ricardo Bordalo Junquiero, partner, VdA
Johannes Hertfelder, partner, Gleiss Lutz
Helen Hu, general counsel, Volvo Cars
Juan Jiménez-Laiglesia, partner, Pérez-Llorca
Helen Lambert, senior legal counsel, GFG Alliance
Sarah Milde Lodde, partner, Hengeler Mueller
Patrick Mossler, partner and M&A practice group head, Gleiss Lutz
Peter Stassen, partner, Plesner
Charis Xiourouppa, head of Caselex, LexisNexis
Click here to download the report, Bridging the competition law gap: How Europe’s lawyers are keeping cross-border deals aligned across teams, regulators and jurisdictions, and here to visit the Generative AI Legal Research Hub.
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