Harvey, the company behind the Legal Agent Bench (LAB), has extended its platform to handle M&A due diligence. The move targets the high-cost, labor-intensive workflows that underpin multi-trillion-dollar deals. The company said the expansion is designed to streamline the process, though it did not disclose specific clients or pricing.
Targeting the cost of M&A due diligence
Mergers and acquisitions due diligence is a notoriously expensive and time-consuming part of dealmaking. Law firms and investment banks often spend weeks reviewing contracts, regulatory filings, and financial statements. Harvey's LAB, originally built for legal research and document analysis, is now being adapted to handle that workload.
The company claims the tool can cut down the manual effort required to review thousands of documents. But it declined to provide metrics on speed or accuracy improvements. The LAB's expansion comes as the M&A market shows signs of recovery, with global deal volume expected to rebound after a sluggish 2023.
What the LAB does — and doesn't do
Harvey's Legal Agent Bench is a platform that automates parts of legal work. It uses language models to parse contracts, flag risks, and draft summaries. For M&A due diligence, that means scanning target company agreements for change-of-control clauses, restrictive covenants, and other deal-breakers.
The tool is not a replacement for lawyers, the company stresses. It handles the grunt work — reading, cross-referencing, and spotting inconsistencies — so human reviewers can focus on strategy and negotiation. Whether that promise holds in live deal environments is still being tested.
Due diligence costs can eat into deal margins, especially for mid-market transactions where legal fees run hundreds of thousands of dollars. For larger deals, the bill can top $10 million. Harvey's LAB is entering a space already crowded with options from companies like Kira Systems, Luminance, and eBrevia. But Harvey has positioned itself as a premium player, with a focus on deeper integration into existing law firm workflows.
The company hasn't said which firms are using the expanded LAB yet. It's likely that early adopters are among the handful of elite law firms that have tested Harvey's other tools. The challenge will be proving the platform can handle the sheer volume and variety of documents in a cross-border M&A transaction.
Harvey has been quiet about its roadmap beyond this expansion. The company has not announced a timeline for broader availability or whether it plans to add other deal-related functions, like post-merger integration or regulatory approval tracking. The M&A due diligence feature is live now, but adoption by investment banks and law firms will test the tool's ability to deliver in high-stakes, time-sensitive scenarios.
