From Bottleneck to Strategic Partner: AI Rewrites the M&A Playbook

CHICAGO, IL – June 22, 2026

In the high-stakes, fast-paced world of mergers and acquisitions, time is the most valuable and least forgiving commodity. For corporate legal teams, the due diligence phase—a meticulous review of every contract, clause, and commitment—has traditionally been a monumental, time-consuming bottleneck. But a tangible shift is underway, one where technology is not just accelerating the process but fundamentally reshaping the legal department's role from a reactive cost center to a proactive strategic asset. The recent experience of Cvent, a leader in hospitality technology, provides a compelling case study in this transformation.

During a recent critical acquisition, Cvent's in-house legal team was tasked with reviewing 360 complex contracts under a compressed timeline. What could have taken a team of lawyers weeks of painstaking manual review was accomplished in minutes. The engine behind this dramatic efficiency gain was Kira, an AI-powered contract intelligence platform from Litera. This isn't just a story about speed; it's about how purpose-built AI is empowering legal professionals to deliver strategic insights at the speed of business, changing the very nature of their contribution to the deal table.

The Anatomy of an AI-Powered Deal

Cvent’s challenge was not unique, but its recent growth trajectory has made the need for efficiency particularly acute. Following its $4.6 billion acquisition by Blackstone in 2023, the company has embarked on an aggressive M&A strategy to expand its technology footprint, acquiring companies like ON24 and Goldcast in deals worth hundreds of millions. This rapid pace puts immense pressure on its legal operations to perform due diligence that is both swift and flawlessly accurate. It was during one of these recent, significant deals that the company’s manual processes hit their limit.

Faced with a mountain of contracts and a critical meeting with the target company just hours away, the team deployed Kira. The platform ingested and analyzed all 360 documents, extracting key provisions and potential risks in minutes. This is a staggering leap from industry benchmarks, where a single complex commercial contract can take a lawyer hours to review. Some studies show AI can slash review times by up to 90%. For Cvent, the impact was immediate. “I would describe Kira’s value to our business in three words: time to value,” said Myah Bowermaster, Cvent’s Head of Legal Operations. “We would not have been able to successfully navigate what was one of our most significant deals to date in the timeline required without it.”

More Than a Reviewer: The New Strategic Legal Team

The true difference-maker in Cvent’s story extends beyond the timeline. By automating the laborious first-pass review, the AI platform liberated the legal team to focus on higher-value work: analysis and strategy. Instead of simply confirming the existence of change-of-control clauses, lawyers could analyze the data provided by the AI to assess risk, inform negotiation strategy, and plan for post-merger integration. This shift elevates the legal department from a gatekeeper to a strategic partner.

“In-house legal teams are being asked to move faster and take on more complexity,” noted Ashley Miller, Vice President of Sales for North America at Litera. “What Cvent's team accomplished with Kira is what purpose-built contract intelligence should do: turn high contract volume from a bottleneck into a source of strategic insight and make legal a trusted partner at the deal table.” This evolution is driving the growth of legal operations as a discipline, requiring professionals who are not only legally astute but also technologically savvy and data-literate. They are becoming the architects of the modern legal department’s operating system, ensuring the right tools are in place to translate legal data into business intelligence.

Building Trust in the Machine: Determinism Over Probability

For a profession built on precedent and risk aversion, adopting AI has been a cautious journey. The central challenge is trust. In a legal context, a “mostly right” answer is a potential liability. This is where the distinction between different types of AI becomes critical. While general-purpose generative AI models can draft an email or summarize a news report, they operate on probability, which can introduce inaccuracies or “hallucinations” that are unacceptable in legal analysis.

Litera emphasizes that Kira’s strength lies in its hybrid approach, which combines its own proprietary AI, trained on over a million legal contracts and refined by 45,000 lawyer hours, with the capabilities of large language models. This creates a system that delivers what the company calls “deterministic accuracy”—a consistent, reliable, and verifiable output for identifying specific legal concepts. This specialized training is designed to build confidence. Knowing the AI is grounded in deep domain expertise, rather than just the vast, unstructured data of the internet, is what allows legal teams to rely on its output for high-stakes decisions. It's this focus on verifiable accuracy that has made platforms like Kira a go-to for M&A due diligence, where precision is paramount.

The Ripple Effect: Reshaping the Legal Tech Landscape

Cvent’s experience is a snapshot of a much broader wave of transformation. The adoption of AI for contract review in legal departments more than doubled in the last year alone, and the market is responding with a surge of innovation. Competitors are racing to integrate AI, particularly generative AI, into their offerings, pushing the industry toward more sophisticated and intuitive tools. The next frontier appears to be “agentic AI”—systems that can execute multi-step workflows with human oversight, rather than direct input at every stage.

Litera, already used by 99% of the top 100 U.S. law firms, is well-positioned within this dynamic landscape. Its acquisition of Kira Systems in 2021 was a strategic move to deepen its M&A capabilities, a specialty where its platform continues to be highly regarded. As billions are invested in AI infrastructure, the pace of change will only accelerate. The story of one company reviewing 360 contracts in minutes is no longer a futuristic hypothetical; it is a clear indicator of the new standard for legal work, where technology-empowered human expertise drives tangible and decisive business outcomes.