ABOUT DEALSTANDARD

Built by dealmakers,
for dealmakers.

The tools available to lawyers are getting better every day. AI can help us review more thoroughly, draft more efficiently and work through difficult questions. Much of that progress improves what each of us can do individually. There is still plenty of work to do on how we work together.

A transaction depends on people exchanging information, making decisions and carrying those decisions through. Too much attention still goes into reconstructing conversations from email chains, finding the right draft, coordinating specialist teams and figuring out who was supposed to deliver a document.

These burdens rarely disappear with a better prompt. They need a better way of organizing the work.

We’re building DealStandard because we know that work, including the parts that take more effort than they should. M&A involves judgment, negotiation, competing priorities and a constant exchange between people whose work depends on one another. The documents need to reflect all of it.

Our purpose is to build tools that make those transactions easier to run. We’re starting with the friction we have experienced ourselves and will keep refining the tools around the problems dealmakers encounter in practice.

These are our first two.

The M&A Guide

A place to work through your position.

Every M&A lawyer builds a collection of precedents, studies and lessons from negotiations. Some of it is organized. Much of it lives in old files or in the heads of people who have seen the issue before.

The Guide makes that knowledge easier to explore and apply. It brings agreement topics into an interactive reference where you can compare buyer and seller positions, examine the arguments behind them, review market findings and adapt drafting alternatives. A separate prompt builder helps you take a structured question into your own AI tool.

“It’s market” and “I’ve never seen that in thirty years of practice” should be invitations to examine a position, rather than reasons to stop discussing it. Experience matters. So do the transaction, the parties and the consequences of the proposed wording.

The Guide gives you a starting point and the reasoning to question it.

Explore the Guide →

The Command Center

A shared workspace to move the deal forward.

Anyone who has run a transaction knows how much work happens between drafts. Getting the right people involved. Collecting their input. Resolving conflicting comments. Following up on approvals. Making sure an agreed position reaches the documents and everyone is working toward the same deadline.

Much of this still happens through separate trackers and repeated exchanges of Word files. As signing approaches, the coordination gets more intense, and keeping the whole picture in view becomes harder.

We’re building the Command Center to bring that work into a shared environment. It connects documents, open points, responsibilities and decisions within one transaction. Your team can work through its analysis privately and share selected items with other advisers, clients or counterparties.

The aim is to give dealmakers a clearer view and greater control: what has been agreed, what still needs attention, who needs to act and what depends on their response. As the work progresses, the record stays with the deal, instead of being pieced together again for the next call, handover or closing checklist.

Explore the Command Center →

Where AI fits

We see considerable potential for AI to help teams follow the connections within a transaction: identify an unresolved dependency, flag a decision that affects another workstream or suggest a practical next step.

Getting that right starts with understanding the work. Which decisions require judgment? What information is missing? Who needs to act? What can be shared, and with whom?

Lawyers need to help shape those workflows from the beginning. Their input determines whether a tool understands the problem well enough to be useful.

That is the approach we intend to take as we develop AI capabilities within DealStandard. First understand the friction and establish a reliable record of the deal. Then introduce assistance that draws on that context, explains its recommendations and leaves the team in control.