Punch above your weight: closing a €60M M&A deal on Lexity
Ankita MehtaIn our In Practice series we sit down with the lawyers who actually use Lexity day-to-day. Not to demo features, but to ask what changed in their work, what they trust, and what's still missing.
Episode three: Daniel Lorber, corporate M&A lawyer with more than fifteen years in the profession, today running a boutique transactional practice with two associates and a client book of tech companies. The reason we wanted Daniel on camera: he left a large firm partnership precisely because he thought the economics of legal work were about to change. He has now run a €60M cross-border M&A deal on the small-team model, and he is unusually candid about where the tool earns its place and where it doesn't.
Executive summary
- Daniel left a large-firm partnership specifically because he believed AI was about to reshape who could take which kind of work. "It was only a matter of time until the technology was trustworthy enough, and then the profession would gravitate to the most fitting advisor, not the biggest team."
- A real €60M cross-border M&A buy-side, target of 1,000+ employees and a sprawling commercial book, was run with a small team using per-area due-diligence checklists in the Due Diligence Clickflow™.
- The Closing Checklist Clickflow™ replaced 2 to 3 hours of careful, item-by-item work with a cited, working table he uses as the team's source of truth.
- Trust is the precondition, not a side effect. After early hallucinations with general-purpose models, citations are now the line in the sand. "Whatever it says, I can click on it and see the actual reference."
Meet Daniel
Daniel has practised corporate M&A for more than fifteen years, most of those years as a lawyer and partner at large firms. Two and a half years ago he left to set up a boutique private practice with two associates. The clientele skews tech: founders' agreements, ongoing commercial work, financing rounds, and standalone M&A, both buy-side and sell-side.
The decision to leave was, by his own account, partly a bet on AI:
When I decided to leave a large firm and set up my own practice, one of the primary reasons was an understanding that the profession was going to shift, from who has a big enough team to take on a transaction, to who is the most fitting advisor. It was only a matter of time until the technology was sufficient and trustworthy enough, and then the profession would gravitate to the value a senior lawyer provides.
He has a one-line way of describing what that means in practice:
You can punch above your weight. You couldn't take certain transactions in the past because you just didn't have the ability to review those volumes of documents with a small team. Now you can do it fast, efficiently, methodically. That's a big advantage.
Before Lexity: a full day on a single SPA
We asked Daniel to walk us through one specific task he used to do, in concrete terms, before AI. He picked the share purchase agreement.
The first review of an SPA was "easily a full day of work" on a 30-page document. Confirming it tracks the term sheet. Marking up the reps and warranties, the indemnification structure, the closing mechanics. In parallel, a junior associate prepared ancillaries: board resolutions, shareholder register, the closing checklist. "It's a technical task, but very substantive, going item by item to make sure you haven't missed anything. Anywhere from a couple of hours to two-three hours."
That second task, the closing checklist, is the one he now does "instantaneously."
Today, using the Closing Checklist Clickflow™, this is done instantaneously. I find myself going there first. I have a complete table already working for me, deliverables, signatories, deadlines, citations, and the team can start checking the boxes.
A day in the life: three Clickflows™ he won't give up
Asked for the three he uses daily on deal work, Daniel went straight to:
- Extensive Summary with Focus Area. "Many times work is dynamic, a client calls and says we need quick input on this agreement, can we jump on a call in an hour? Instead of taking a full document and starting to review it, I run this, and then I have a much more intelligent review after I've gotten the feedback." He uses it to ask, in one prompt, for adverse sections from the distributor's perspective on a new distribution agreement, and Lexity returns the indemnification one-sidedness, the uncapped liability, the punitive performance metrics, and a suggested mitigating-language draft, all cited.
- Closing Checklist on the SPA. A complete deliverables table the whole deal team works from. "This is a significant issue, because it helps move the transaction along."
- Due Diligence with a custom checklist. "I create a checklist on specific fields of interest, upload numerous documents in that subject matter, and I get an analysis based on the issues I put in the checklist. That's something I had the chance to do on a transaction where there was a significant due-diligence scope, it really assisted in reviewing documents at a pace equivalent to having additional team members."
He also flagged a quieter fourth one, Compare with Insights, which earns its keep in the last 24 hours before a signing:
When you get to the final version, parties will say 'this is the document we're going to sign.' You can quickly check it's exactly the final word version that was agreed, then sign off and tell the client they can sign. That's a big advantage. It gives me peace of mind before signing.
On trust: why citations were the unlock
We asked Daniel why he doesn't use GPT, Claude, or Gemini directly on deal documents. The answer is one we keep hearing from senior lawyers, and we think it's worth quoting at length.
I don't find them trustworthy enough. There've been several instances where I've tried them and seen hallucinations, or just wrong answers based on a specific document or field of law. And like everything in life, trust once fractured is difficult to regain. If you see someone reciting a section in an agreement that doesn't exist, you lose trust.
Lexity earns back that trust in two ways he can verify himself.
The first is citations. "With citations I can stand on whatever it says, click on it, and see the actual reference to the place in the agreement. That builds trust, and it shows the analysis is taken from the correct place." That click-through is doing more work than it looks. It collapses the gap between "the AI says X" and "the contract says X" into a single action. The lawyer remains in the loop, but the audit is now constant-time rather than full re-read.
The second is the trust posture of the platform, which matters specifically for the kind of work he does:
Knowing you're working with something tailored for specific use cases, and trained for that, is very significant. And knowing you're working with a company that's GDPR-compliant, has ISO certificates, you feel comfortable with data privacy. You're not one of those giant companies where you never quite know the accountability. For lawyers, feeling comfortable sharing documents, and knowing who they're sharing with, is critical.
For a transactional lawyer, deal documents are the most sensitive artefact in the practice. The question of which AI sees them, and on what terms, is not a procurement footnote. It's the precondition for any of the speed gains to matter at all.
A €60M deal, run on a small team
The transaction Daniel walked us through is the kind of case that, on the old model, would have required a full mid-tier team.
We worked on an M&A deal for the buyer side, around €60 million. The target was significant, over a thousand employees, many commercial agreements across a broad spectrum: distribution agreements, software-license agreements, IT staffing in different locations for customers. Quite diverse.
The unlock was the Due Diligence Clickflow™ run per legal area, each with its own checklist:
We had a specific checklist for labor agreements. A specific checklist for commercial agreements. We used the Change of Control Clickflow™ to make sure any agreement with a change-of-control clause was picked up, and we could fold that into the due-diligence checklist as an issue of interest. It really helped us review many documents efficiently, and it assisted us in meeting the client's expectations on the deal deadlines.
One of the underrated parts of the workflow: he configures the focus-area prompt to ask for mitigating language on each flagged adverse clause. The output is no longer just "here are the issues" but "here are the issues, here is a draft of how you would solve them." He doesn't accept the language as-is. He doesn't have to. It collapses the time to a markup.
What changed: a partner-shaped sounding board
We asked Daniel the question we ask every interviewee in this series: not what feature changed, but what about the work changed.
The most significant thing is understanding that there is help that wasn't previously there. As you become more senior, you usually have fewer and fewer people to consult, and you make more and more decisions on your own. This doesn't replace that, but it gives you another partner to ask questions, receive feedback. It helps you walk into a meeting more prepared, ask specific questions about a document on the way in. As a lawyer these days, that's extremely significant.
There's a softer second-order effect that turns up only with senior practitioners: the cost of asking the basic question is now zero. "You can prepare before a meeting, ask specific questions about a specific document and get specific answers. Instead of calling someone into your room who knows the document, you can do this yourself."
What he wants next
We pushed Daniel on what he'd like to see Lexity do next. His answer was a step-change rather than a polish:
Today AI is replacing a lot of what you would ask an intern or a junior lawyer to do. What would be most useful at my profile is to have it operating at a mid-to-senior associate level. Replying to a complicated email. Taking the first draft of an SPA. Those are very valuable.
This is something we openly agree with and openly haven't shipped yet. Drafting at senior-associate quality is the next frontier. Half-baked first drafts cost more time than they save. We'd rather ship it correctly than ship it early.
What he'd tell another lawyer
For commercial lawyers especially, judged not just on quality but on deal timelines, Daniel's recommendation was unambiguous:
Definitely go for it. Commercial lawyers as opposed to litigators get judged on quality of work and on meeting deal timetables. We need the efficiency, and where we can get it is a blessing. For lawyers who are overwhelmed with work, or thinking about growing the team but not sure when to recruit, this is a great way to mend the gap or fill the gap. You'll get a lot of benefit when you're working at high scale even without a big team.
That phrase, mend the gap, or fill the gap, is the boutique-firm thesis. Daniel left big-law on that thesis. He is, currently, running it.
