Legora is expanding rapidly, and M&A is a tool to accelerate our roadmap. We just announced our fourth acquisition in three months (Walter, Qura, Graceview, and Cadastral). Historically a single, relatively small transaction would span several months of work. Earlier this year, our team closed an acquisition end to end in 13 days: signed NDA on a Monday, due diligence report delivered Friday, SPA negotiated and signed the following weekend.

We led this deal from the finance side, not the legal side. That matters. In a conventional deal, someone in finance is largely dependent on outside counsel to surface what is in the data room, translate it into business implications, and tell us what to worry about. With Legora, we could do most of that work ourselves. We came to every call with the lawyers already knowing what was in the contracts, where the risks sat, and what the right questions were. The relationship shifted from "tell me what we should think" to "here is what we think, push back on it." That is a better partnership, and a much faster deal.

We've seen this before

Every wave of legal technology has promised to accelerate M&A. Data rooms replaced banker's boxes. Document comparison tools replaced redlining by hand. Contract analytics replaced first pass review. Each wave saved time on individual tasks, but the overall shape of a deal stayed roughly the same: weeks of diligence, weeks of drafting, weeks of negotiation.

Agentic AI changes the shape, not just the speed. Legora’s agentic operating system is its strategic advantage in M&A. Negotiations get faster, due diligence is streamlined, and conversations that once took months can now be had in a fraction of the time.

Where the hours go now

The target had roughly 900 documents in the data room across four jurisdictions. A conventional deal team would spend a week on the first pass review alone. We did it in half a day.

Before diligence opened, we ran the inbound NDA against our firm's playbook using the Word Add in. It flagged a non market provision (a one sided non solicit) and proposed playbook compliant markup. 

Once the data room opened, Tabular Review became the spine of the process. We uploaded the full document set and defined our extraction columns: change of control triggers, assignment restrictions, termination rights, governing law, material indemnities, IP ownership, exclusivity clauses, data protection obligations. The grid populated across all documents in under two hours, with every cell citation linked back to the source.

For the commercial contracts, we needed more than a catalog of terms. We wanted to understand the texture of the customer relationships and whether the numbers held up. We built a Workflow to extract the key commercial terms, cross reference them against the target's revenue disclosures, and flag any contracts where the economic exposure looked inconsistent with what management had represented. That kind of analysis would normally take corp dev and legal several days.

For jurisdictional questions, we used Legal Research. Minority shareholder rights in one of the non US subsidiaries, for example. Sourced, cited answers in minutes, rather than waiting a day for a memo from local counsel.

When it came time to draft the diligence report, the Editor assembled a first draft from the Tabular Review outputs and Workflow findings, organized into our standard report structure. We were editing, not starting from a blank page.

What agentic actually means here

When the Workflow cross referenced commercial contracts against the financials, nobody told it which contracts to flag. Legora figured it out. It read the revenue disclosure, understood which customer concentrations mattered, pulled the corresponding contracts, and identified the ones where the numbers did not line up. That is judgment applied at scale, not a macro running a fixed sequence.

The implication for the team is real. When an agent handles extraction, synthesis, and the first draft, the people working the deal spend their time on verification, judgment, and negotiation. For someone in finance, it means we can engage substantively with the legal questions instead of waiting on someone else to translate them for me.

Why trust is the whole game

None of this works without trust, and trust in legal work comes from being able to verify, not just from accuracy.

Every output is cited and traceable. When Tabular Review surfaces a change of control trigger, we click through to the exact clause. When the Editor drafts a section, every factual claim links back to a source document. Anyone can spot check any output in seconds.

Humans stay in the loop where it matters. We approve the playbook redlines before they go out. We negotiate the SPA ourselves.

What happens when Legora is on both sides

Our pace is often capped by the other side, not by us. We can extract, synthesize, and respond in hours, but we still wait days for counter drafts, for diligence responses, for redlines. A deal moves at the speed of the slowest party in the room.

Now imagine Legora on both sides of the transaction. The throughput stops being constrained by either side's manual capacity. Diligence questions get answered the same day. Redlines come back in hours. Both parties get to a closeable agreement faster, with less wasted motion. That is not a zero sum gain. It creates value for everyone at the table.

Each deal makes the next one faster

The work we did on this transaction does not stay on this transaction. The diligence question set, the Workflow we built to cross check contracts against financials, the playbook positions we hardened during NDA negotiation, the report structure the Editor used. All of it carries forward.

For the next acquisition, we are not starting from scratch. We are starting from a refined set of questions, a tested set of Workflows, and an institutional view of what mattered last time. Each deal sharpens the playbook, which sharpens the next deal. 

What this means for M&A

Remove the bottlenecks and the whole shape of a transaction changes. Diligence stops being a month-long sprint and becomes a continuous process that runs alongside negotiation.

The deals are not easier. The standards are not lower. If anything, we catch things we used to miss, because an agent that reads every document is more thorough than a team that reads the important ones. What has changed is the tempo.

13 days is the new ceiling, not the floor. The next deal will be faster, and the one after that faster still, because the platform keeps improving and the team keeps getting better at using it.