The age of speed: How legal AI tools will transform M&A in 2025

2025 is widely expected to see a surge in the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) market, following political and macroeconomic uncertainty in 2024. As almost two billion people worldwide voted in major national elections last year, uncertainty subdued global M&A in the first half of 2024. Since the U.S., the U.K., France, India, and many others have been to the polls, deal activity has already picked up.  

Last year, global M&A deal value increased 8% year-on-year to $3.4tn, nearing pre-pandemic levels, according to law firm Morrison Foerster. However, this doesn’t come close to 2021, a record year for both deal value and deal count. Despite not being a record year, 2024 was a good year for larger deals, with 29 deals of $10bn or more in transaction value, as reported by S&P Global.  

Although concerns remain around inflation and interest rates, geopolitical tensions, and the potential for shifts in regulatory oversight, there is reason to be hopeful that 2025 will be a bumper year for M&A.  

And for success, especially in the private markets, dealmakers need surgical precision.  

How AI streamlines due diligence in M&A  

Two-thirds of dealmakers globally have made exploring the use of AI in M&A a top priority, with most agreeing that AI could speed up deals by up to 50%.  

That’s no surprise. Due diligence timelines have increased dramatically over the last decade, from 124 days on average to 203 days. Speed gained from AI helps in two ways: allowing for deeper due diligence of complex deals on demanding timelines, and screening more opportunities to begin with. Particularly when firms want to pre-empt an auction process, accuracy must be complimented by speed.  

“You need to get it done very quickly to be able to pre-empt, but you can't compromise on the quality of your diligence because you might end up buying the wrong asset, or the right one at the wrong price,” explains Frederik Muelke, Head of Alternative Assets at Robin AI. “Without AI, firms just won’t stay competitive.”

By recognizing patterns, AI can spot risks or anomalies across thousands of documents. Instead of manually sifting through those contracts, unearthing some of the issues but not all of them, a skillfully trained and prompted AI model allows a legal team to reduce the need for manual oversight.  

Human-in-the-loop: enhancing, not replacing, legal expertise  

Some legal teams worry that adopting AI will threaten their jobs. These concerns are understandable, but AI is designed to enhance the capabilities of legal professionals.  

That means teams that become proficient at using AI – no matter their age, experience or credentials – will get a career boost from partnering with these tools. “AI won’t replace lawyers. Lawyers who use AI will replace lawyers who don’t,” Muelke says.  

Even the most advanced AI cannot yet replicate a seasoned lawyer’s judgment, intuition, or strategic thinking — skills that remain critical in M&A and especially in pre-emptive bids.  

For example, while AI can flag ambiguous clauses or discrepancies, it still takes a lawyer’s insight to assess the impact of those issues on the broader transaction. AI provides lawyers with a head start, doing the heavy lifting of data extraction and summarization, so that they can apply their expertise more effectively.  

Fortunately, this view is beginning to manifest in the industry. Robin AI’s State of Legal AI 2024 Survey showed that legal professionals are “increasingly seeing it as a tool to enhance their work rather than a threat to their roles”.

By adopting a human-in-the-loop approach, firms can boost both their legal risk mitigation efforts and the careers of their lawyers at the same time.