Best Lawyers, Best AI: Ropes & Gray’s Plan to Grow M&A With Tech

Big Law’s Ropes & Gray is competing for a wider range of deals work, thanks to artificial intelligence tools, according to the firm’s leaders.

“There’s an opportunity for top firms to recapture a lot of work that we’ve lost on cost,” Julie Jones, Ropes & Gray’s chair, said in an interview.

Massive law firms such as Kirkland & Ellis and Latham & Watkins dominate the deals market by scoring a high volume of transactions. Ropes & Gray—among the country’s 10 largest law firms by revenue, but about half the size of those rivals by headcount—targets a smaller segment of high-value private equity, life sciences, and other deals.

AI can make the deal process more efficient and reduce costs for clients, said Jones, private equity practice leader David Blittner, and M&A partner Jackie Cohen. That will free up the firm’s lawyers to take on more deals and mid-sized transactions that usually generate lower fees.

“Every single large asset aggregator right now has different products at different parts of the capital spectrum,” said Blittner, who advises private equity sponsors such as Avista Healthcare Partners and New Mountain Capital. “You want to be able to walk through every single door of an asset manager. You don’t want to turn away business because you want to be embedded.”

Julie Jones

Photo: Ropes & Gray

The firm uses off-the-shelf legal tech tools—from providers such as Harvey and Hebbia—which it then tailors to clients’ needs, with specific tech stacks designed for different practice areas. It is testing “hundreds” of such tools, according to Jones.

“You take the tools, you figure out what you think is best in class, and you develop bespoke adaptations,” she said. “We are, in a way, systems integrators for our big clients. That is a new area of lawyering, creating the prompts and the processes.”

Those products increasingly are a central part of client pitch meetings.

“We now send our technology people to pitches,” Jones said.

“We’re actually competing against the combination of best-in-class tool and best-in-class lawyers, which is kind of fun,” she said. “I’ve only seen tool-based competition like that in the last four or five weeks.”

Mid-Market Play

Jones, an M&A partner, took the reins at Ropes & Gray in 2020 and was elected to serve a second term in 2024. She has represented TPG Inc. on several transactions at the Boston-founded firm where she began her career.

Ropes & Gray snagged the 20th spot on the latest Bloomberg Law league tables, advising on nearly $100 billion worth of M&A deals through the first three quarters of this year. Its biggest deals this year include acting as health care regulatory counsel for Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. in its $10 billion take private acquisition by Sycamore Partners LLC in March.

The firm’s M&A tally is about a quarter of the amount by leaders such as Kirkland and Latham. But those firms each steered more than 500 deals during the same time, compared with about 185 transactions for Ropes & Gray.

Ropes’ move to take on more mid-market work will have the firm competing with Big Law rivals that have largely aimed at deals valued at under $1 billion, such as WilmerHale, Eversheds Sutherland, K&L Gates, and Akerman LLP.

Associates at the firm recently used AI to slash their time working on a “very unique deal in the crypto space,” said Cohen, who has advised National Amusements Inc. related to the Paramount Skydance merger, among other large corporate clients. She gave the associates a term sheet, along with a collaboration agreement “from a completely different area of the law” and asked them to create a first draft of an agreement.

“It took about 20 minutes,” Cohen said, rather than the “four or five hours of research and putting things together” typically expected. “Did we change that draft monumentally between then and when we sent it out? We did, but it eliminated that four to five hours of just searching and trying to figure out where to start.”

It’s “way too early” to conclude that the tools are going to replace large swaths of junior associates, according to Jones. Tech developments could have in-house corporate legal departments shifting more work to outside firms.

“That could come largely at the expense of in-house group size and not external counsel,” she said. “They don’t need people at a lower cost monitoring their precedent and thinking about what their standards are—that’s just going to be tracked in an automated way.”

“But they can’t match what law firms can do and see across industry competitors and when entering a new area of subject matter expertise,” Jones said. “That’s going to have to come from law firms.”