Legal Operations Is Hidden Catalyst for Faster M&A Integration

Mergers and acquisitions are on the rise. McKinsey notes that for the first half of 2025, global deal value (for deals greater than $25 million) increased by about 22% year over year compared to the first half of 2024, to about $2 trillion. Yet deals are closing slower.

The period between signing and closing has risen for M&A transactions exceeding $2 billion, according to a recent analysis by the Boston Consulting Group. The increase is most pronounced for the largest deals, with those over $10 billion taking 27% longer to close than deals valued between $2 billion and $10 billion.

Markets reward speed; every week shaved off integration can lift combined-entity earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization by 2-3 basis points.

Legal operations leaders are the hidden lever to achieve this lift and can cut weeks off timelines and millions off integration budgets. Legal operations can deliver that speed—if it expands beyond tactical firefighting into strategic orchestration.

In 2020, legal ops teams were primarily focused on cost control, basic playbooks, and coordinating with outside-counsel during an M&A event.

Today, legal operations is more than a support function, just managing administrative tasks and outside counsel spend. It’s viewed as an indispensable partner for general counsel, playing a pivotal role in optimizing legal department efficiency, managing risk, leveraging technology, and driving business value.

Generative artifical intelligence, including areas such as review automation, typically owned by legal ops, has risen to the forefront when looking at document-intensive exercises like M&A due diligence and request response.

Additionally, cross-functional project management discipline expertise (such as Agile sprints and Objectives and Key Results) is now an expected capability that legal ops can contribute to the management of any large legal undertaking.

Contract-centric hurdles including compressed timelines, data extraction headaches, insufficient planning, experience gaps, and tech mismatches still haunt M&A deals. Legal ops has sharper tools, richer data, and more proven playbooks available to neutralize them.

The result: Legal ops can contribute to both velocity and value creation, not just spend analysis.

Impact on M&A

Legal ops must join the deal term early. Ask to have a representative in the transaction steering committee. Show the committee the value in mapping decision rights and escalation paths before the data room opens. Offer to host daily meetings to keep diligence findings synchronized with finance, HR, and IT.

Due diligence is key. Use technology to your advantage to get full value from due diligence. Stand up a single virtual deal room in place of individual SharePoint folders and deploy AI extraction to surface change-of-control, assignment, and termination clauses from relevant documents at scale. Finally, segment diligence into specialty workstreams (such as IP, privacy, real estate, and commercial contracts) and give each a standardized template to populate weekly for transparency on progress.

Leverage your CLM. Spin up a dedicated Contract Lifestyle Management tenant or repository site for the incoming target on day one. Use the CLM features to auto-generate remedial riders and consent letters directly from clause libraries. Use your tech to route approvals through a CLM (or use Slack, Teams, or eSignature tools) instead of email to reduce cycle time by up to 40%.

Save time and resources with data driven prioritization. Evaluate your extracted content and heat-map risk across both legacy and inherited portfolios to decide where to spend attorney resources first.

Remember to capture your synergies post-close. Focus on opportunities for efficiency. Consolidate outside counsel panels; negotiate volume discounts on transitional work, and leverage aggregate spend analytics to rationalize duplicate vendor contracts within the first 90 days.

Time isn’t a friend for M&A. For organizations facing M&A activity, getting ahead makes a difference. There are some proven strategies to deal with the onslaught.

Scale capacity by pairing core internal teams with experienced, on-demand ALSP resources. A best practice to amplify this flexibility is to establish rate-cards that match task complexity (Tier 0 AI pass, Tier 1 ALSP Review Team, Tier 2 subject-matter counsel) with pre-approved vendors. Knowing up front who can do the work and at what costs avoids the 11th-hour scrambles; resources scale in lockstep with diligence volume.

Translate contracts into information, not just spreadsheets. Modern generative AI based tools now ingest documents, tag metadata, and push clause alerts into a deal-risk dashboard. The key technological change is foundation-model extraction: Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (GPT)-class LLMs trained on your key clauses of interest that allow fast views of contracts portfolios. Human-in-the-loop validation assures quality and reliable responses.

Plan like a PMO: Measure and report in meaningful dashboards. Leading teams embed proven program-management frameworks–such as governing in two-week sprints–for each diligence workstream (IP, privacy, real estate), reporting out key metrics in a public dashboard visible to finance, HR, IT, and integration management leads. Typical metrics for monitoring M&A progress include:

• Letter of Intent (LOI)-to-sign cycle time (days)
• Contracts auto abstracted (% of total)
• Due diligence progress status (% completed)
• Consent-to-assign completion by Day 30 (%)
• Integration issues opened vs. closed (weekly delta)
  

If available, use Power BI or another data visualization tool to help tell the metrics story and keep the data current with a nightly refresh. With real-time charts, executives spot roadblocks while they can still be fixed, not after the post-mortem. Let the C-suite see legal as a value engine, not a bottleneck.

Final Takeaway

Partner, partner, partner! An M&A event is a major disruption to business as usual. Beyond the emotional distraction and time-eating speculation is the very real drain on what are already limited team resources in the legal ops space. Reaching out to scalable resources to handle due diligence, contract portfolio analysis, and other important fast-turn requirements is prudent and cost effective.

Be sure to build a lessons-learned repository; every closed deal should feed smarter playbooks for the next one. Embed operations leaders as early as possible, equip them with AI-driven data pipelines, and govern the process with rigor. When you do, legal shifts from cost guardian to value architect—exactly what modern M&A demands.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg Tax, and Bloomberg Government, or its owners.

Author Information

Diane Homolak is vice president of technology solutions at Integreon, a leading global provider of tech-enabled legal, creative, and business solutions.

Write for Us: Author Guidelines