In M&A transactions, the data room generally holds all the information a buyer needs to know about a target company’s business, and for the first time, technology allows them to actually assess all of it.
For the better part of the last few decades, legal due diligence has been executed by young lawyers, reading through thousands of documents under significant time pressure, hoping nothing slips through the cracks.
“In a traditional acquisition process, for example, the seller populates a virtual data room based on information requests made by the buyer, who then analyses the data, following up with additional queries and potentially some expert meetings to get to the bottom of things. Then, the parties negotiate deal terms and eventually enter into the transaction documents. It may sound simple, but there is usually a lot of data being reviewed and extracted. It often takes an entire team of experts with different legal focus areas to get to the most relevant information, and flag potential issues, while also doing their normal day job,” explains Maurits Arnauw, who worked as a corporate lawyer for the past 10 years and has experienced this first-hand.
He admits that it may seem counterintuitive, but reviewing thousands of documents can be quite costly, and that cost doesn't shrink proportionally for smaller transactions. “Law firms therefore tend to scope diligence to manage cost by taking a sample approach of reviewing, for example, one template employment agreement and a handful of documents that were based on such template, and then clearly specify in an annex to the diligence deliverable which documents were reviewed.”
But Maurits believes this screening process, as well as other data extraction and summary work, can be heavily optimised with technology. “Having spent a decade as a corporate and M&A lawyer, I had experienced many of those pain points first-hand,” he reflects. The connection to Jurimesh came through the Belgian M&A network: the founding team was technically strong but could still use an additional team member who had actually been in the field – and that is where Maurits saw an immediate fit.
“If you have technology running the first screening and then advisors perform their diligence on such output, it will – in principle – cost less and free up the involved advisors’ time to focus on their other daily work,” he explains.
Additionally, there is a lot of back-and-forth during any M&A process. “There are usually questions for various departments or colleagues, and if one is delayed, it can hold up the entire process,” Maurits shares. “Technology can facilitate this with Q&A or project management tools. It’s a huge added value and time-saver.”
Filling the gap with technology
When Maurits learned what Jurimesh’s solution could do, he was really intrigued. One of the features that struck him the most was the data structuring, from a chaotic, unorganised data room into a clean, organised structure based on the user's information request list or a Jurimesh template. “I remember a few years ago, we were involved in a few transactions where the data rooms were hosted on Google Drive or Dropbox. We spent at least two days trying to make sense of it and create some sort of index”, Maurits reflects. “Jurimesh can do it in less than a minute… Jurimesh even allows a user to assign and follow up on questions in just a few clicks, rather than sending tens of Excel sheets, Word documents and emails to keep track of things.”
This is exactly what Jorrit Willaert and Jasper de Moor set out to solve when they founded the company in 2023. “We targeted various fields, starting with accounting, and noticed that they used it primarily for searching through legislation and case law, so we pivoted into legal tech,” Jorrit says.
Jurimesh brought in legal authors and specialists to help create risk guides for what each of the commonly reviewed documents should contain, as well as the “red flag” findings that can be found in them – similar to the training process for junior lawyers. This is then translated into complex prompting and algorithms that form the basic building blocks of the large language model (LLM) and tools the platform uses.
“This foundation ensures that the software’s output is consistent”, Maurits explains. “In several backtests, including with the sampling technique, the tool flagged every issue humans had. That builds trust.”
Two years later, the Jurimesh team grew to 10 people, but few with practical experience in the field. And so, in early March 2026, Jurimesh appointed Maurits as an in-house legal professional, where he quickly learned that working at a legal tech start-up is very different from a traditional law firm. “I hit the ground running, which is a good thing, and we move very fast. Wearing all kinds of different hats is a new, interesting challenge.”
He likens it to being in a train, with the world rushing past you. “In a large, traditional law firm, it often takes a long time before decisions are made and implemented. It’s clear that at Jurimesh, everyone is on the same page, considering there is a clear momentum to move things forward.”
Maturing tech capabilities across M&A
This conservatism is something Jorrit also noticed in the beginning when building Jurimesh. “There was a lot of hesitance around using certain tools, especially AI.
He has since seen a shift in the digital maturity of Belgium’s M&A industry, however. “We are seeing growing adoption of broad platform solutions, though we also see firms that have stepped back from them – the cost is high and adoption rates are often lower than expected,” he observes. “That is where focused point solutions like ours, embedded directly in the existing legal workflow, tend to outperform.” “It just frees the users from the administrative processes, without completely transforming the way of working, and allows them to do more legal reasoning and recommendations, which is where their value really lies.”
According to Gartner, the industry has surpassed the stage of early adopters. Maurits adds that people who used to be concerned about the trade-off between security and efficiency are coming to realise that you don’t have to choose between the two. “Today, tech in general is being looked at more frequently. Even traditional law firms are looking into launching pilots for due diligence and deal drafting.”
Moreover, he notes that the youth and juniors coming into the businesses grew up with technology and LLMs like ChatGPT. “Prompting is part of their daily routine – some don’t even use Google search anymore. It would be naive for a law firm to disregard this.”
With pressure to transform coming from all sides of the deal table, the firms that adopt early won't just be more efficient, they'll be carrying less risk than the ones still sampling.
