Level up M&A due diligence reviews with HighQ and Document Intelligence

The days of wondering whether you turned off the oven before you left the house or coming back to a cold home after vacation are likely behind you.

Most of us have connected key functions of our homes to a smartphone to control our comfort and practical sites from anywhere. If we’ve got them connected through a single app, we may even be able to set ourselves to “away” and have our home know what to do.

Smart homes keep getting smarter and more innovative and our need for smart offices keeps growing, too. Not so much with temperature control and light dimmers, but we need to get insights from past actions. To see patterns in documents and use them to inform our approach. To do a task and have the output of that task flow to the next task. To put more science into our art.

An integrated approach for managing M&A due diligence

Attorneys focusing on mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have a new way to bring a smart-home approach to their due diligence work. Integrating HighQ and Document Intelligence from Thomson Reuters will drastically improve your M&A due diligence reviews.

Document Intelligence is a powerful tool on its own. Legal professionals use it to speed up the due diligence review process by loading documents to it and using its search and analytics features to better understand the company they are reviewing. As one user said, “Whenever you can get the most updated details in a matter of seconds, that’s very powerful.”

You can significantly improve time-to-value ratios in your reviews because the system uses AI models built by Practical Law editors and a century of legal data. It helps attorneys hone in on crucial information without reading every single line themselves. One attorney reported, “We hit a grand slam with a $4-million find. We were searching for a needle in a haystack when we didn’t even know the needle was there.” There was no guarantee the firm would have found that $4 million with a manual search through documents, and the team certainly wouldn’t have found it as quickly.

That alone is game-changing technology. But many lawyers have found that they can go even faster and be even more effective when they plug Document Intelligence into HighQ.

HighQ is a legal business management software that automates and simplifies processes from a single interface. Using HighQ's automation capabilities, legal professionals can quickly create data visualizations, workflows, risk evaluations, and more. They can manage high volumes of documents quickly, easily, and securely share and manage work with colleagues and create reports and risk evaluations based on their findings.

Legal professionals use Document Intelligence and HighQ together

One challenge of due diligence reviews is organizing the key documents for easy access and analysis. Now, legal professionals have a way to simplify that effort.

First, identify and locate key documents

Document Intelligence users can search across thousands of contracts and find what they are looking for in moments.

Next, store them in one place for collaboration

Then, users can send these key documents to a HighQ iSheet, a spreadsheet-like database that legal professionals use to share, collaborate on, and track dynamic data.

From there, automate and streamline processes

Within the iSheet, users can analyze, share, and build reports from the data. What used to be a manual effort — involving resaving or tagging documents and copying and pasting snippets — is now an automated and effective process that gets you quickly to visualizations, workflows, risk evaluations, and more.

That is just one example of how attorneys use Document Intelligence and HighQ to smarten up their approach to due diligence reviews. You can also use the integrated tool to track your project progress and to surface red flags across a document set. You will see the number of documents currently under review and those that haven’t been reviewed or are with other reviewers. This visibility into review status can help you stay on track and ensure that other reviewers do their part without searching your email or calling for status updates.

For every lawyer who has combed through hundreds or thousands of documents, lamenting that there has to be a better way: your time has come. The integration of Document Intelligence and HighQ provides a centralized platform that lets you spend more time advising your clients and crafting strategy and less time sorting through boilerplates looking for that needle in the haystack.

Find out how you can use Document Intelligence and HighQ to reimagine your M&A due diligence process.