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The advent of document digitization and email in the 1990s drove deal attorneys from a paper-driven process toward a digital deal workflow. The earliest software applications for transactional attorneys are now core workflow tools for every law firm. Attorneys regularly use email, Microsoft Word, PDF applications, document management systems and redlining tools.

But fitting complex workflows into generic software applications created brand-new bottlenecks in the deal process—from due diligence review to document drafting to signing and closing—that still exist today. Fortunately for deal attorneys, new tools continue to emerge to address these pain points.

Diligence

One of the earliest technologies built for deal teams was the virtual data room. Virtual data rooms are online repositories where information can be shared confidentially between select parties in a tightly controlled environment. Virtual data rooms replaced physical rooms where potential buyers would confidentially review a seller's documents in person.

The prominence of virtual data rooms created an opportunity to more efficiently review the documents in these repositories. Diligence automation tools can now help attorneys identify, extract and analyze key contract information in company agreements and related documents. By training machine learning algorithms on common contract provisions, diligence automation tools can improve the document review process by an order of magnitude and are building a foundation for future contract review tools.

Drafting

Once deals move from the diligence to the drafting phase, software such as document assembly tools can vastly improve the drafting process for common types of agreements. Document assembly software allows attorneys to use templates and past work product to quickly generate new contracts. The first generation of document assembly software required attorneys to code their forms in proprietary formats. Newer document assembly tools provide no-code solutions for converting contracts to templates or even use machine learning technology to automatically identify variables in contracts and stamp out new forms.