About Andersen in Belgium

Andersen in Belgium is a full-service business law firm with 65 people across five offices, soon to be six. It works through three main points of entry: tax, corporate and M&A, and real estate. On the transactional side, the team runs five to eight M&A deals a year, from small five to ten million euro transactions up to the occasional deal north of 300 million.

The firm has a specific history that shapes how it works. In 2019, Koen De Puydt started Seeds of Law together with Leo and Peter, merging a strong M&A and corporate practice with Koen’s real estate background. “Mixing the two teams together was a big hit,” Koen says. The firm grew from 14 to 45 people, and when Andersen came knocking, it felt like an obvious fit. “It was like coming home. They are business-minded people, and they truly work as a team.” A few years later, Seeds of Law became a full member firm and adopted the name, moving from a local brand to one present in more than 180 countries.

Ask Koen to describe the firm in one line and he doesn’t reach for anything fancy. “We’re a full-service business law firm, with entrepreneurs in it. That’s it.” That entrepreneurial streak is why Jurimesh ended up in the middle of one of their tightest deals.

Why a law firm is rethinking itself around AI

Most people picture law as a slow-moving profession. Koen doesn’t have the luxury of agreeing. “If law is slow-moving, then we’re in trouble, because with AI everything has changed dramatically over the last two years.”

He’s blunt about what that means for how a firm is built. “The typical pyramid you had as the organisation of a law firm ten years ago will not exist anymore in five years.” As proof, he points at his own hiring: this year, for the first time in a long time, the firm isn’t recruiting new first-year associates, because so much of the work a junior used to do is now handled with AI.

That doesn’t mean handing legal judgement to a machine. Koen is careful about where the line sits. “You can’t just use generic AI for legal work. You need the knowledge yourself to check that what it produces is correct, and we have a high confidentiality duty to respect.” The point isn’t to replace lawyers. It’s to give them lawyers with technical skills, and tools they actually trust.

The old way: big teams, and time nobody wants to pay for

Legal due diligence has always been a coordination problem. On a typical deal, Andersen would put a full team in a room, employment, contracts, M&A, real estate, public law, each reviewing their slice, with the M&A lawyer holding it all together. Documents lived in a SharePoint or a basic data room. Finding the right clause meant scrolling, searching, and discussing.

“You’d have big teams, time-consuming work,” Koen says. “You’re constantly confronted with all the different aspects of the deal you need to put together, and you lose a lot of time doing it.” And the part that eats the most hours is the part clients increasingly refuse to pay for. “The reading and analysing is the biggest chunk of the work. And that’s exactly what clients aren’t willing to pay for anymore.”

When the seller’s data room failed, Jurimesh became the data room

Then came a deal that had to close in about two weeks. The seller’s side had set up a data room, but it didn’t work. At that speed, a broken data room isn’t an inconvenience, it’s a threat to the whole transaction.

So Andersen made an unusual call. Rather than fight the seller’s system, they asked the other side to put everything into Jurimesh. At the time, the data room functionality wasn’t even generally available yet, and the team used it in beta. It held. “It became the gatekeeper of all the information,” Koen says. Nine people worked the deal inside a single platform that was now doing two jobs at once: hosting every document, and analysing it.

This is the part worth sitting with. Jurimesh wasn’t running alongside a virtual data room. Jurimesh was the data room. “Having the data room and the analysis in one and the same tool is crucial, because we’re the gatekeepers of what goes in,” Koen explains. “We know what’s in there, and we know what we’re linking.”

One place for the data room and the analysis

With everything in one place, the work changes shape. Instead of a team reading thousands of pages to find the issues, the issues are waiting for them. “You still go through the documents, but you already have the big chunk of questions and red flags in front of you, and you just check them.” Every flag was double-checked, first by a team member, then by the responsible partner, before it made the report.

One document made the case on its own. Andersen had been asking for the CEO’s contracts for a long time. The moment those contracts went into the data room, four to five critical red flags surfaced at once: a CEO who was also an employee of the company, carrying a lot of bonuses and a lot of guarantees. In the old workflow, that’s the kind of finding a lawyer only reaches after working through every page. Here it was on the screen the moment the file was uploaded.

Those flags mattered. In the end, the deal didn’t go through, because there were too many critical issues to solve in the time available. That’s not the platform failing, that’s due diligence doing exactly what it’s for: giving the buyer the clarity to walk away before signing. “The help we had from the platform was huge,” Koen says. “For the time and cost we spent on it, it worked perfectly.”

What it changes: half the cost, and a selling point

The economics are hard to argue with.

“If you can automate a big chunk of the work, with the proper check afterwards, you can take maybe half the price out of the diligence. That’s something every company asks for today.”

That’s why Andersen doesn’t hide the tool from clients. They lead with it. “We actually tell clients we use it, and we insist on it, because we know the benefit for them, and the reduction in cost. For us, it’s a selling point.” And the quality holds up, sometimes better than expected.

“We consider the agent as one of our collaborators. Two people on a project are always smarter than one. And honestly, it sometimes surfaces things we wouldn’t have thought of.”

Koen’s advice to other firms still watching from the sidelines is about as direct as it gets.

“It helps us in the due diligence process, generating those red flag reports automatically, which saves a lot of time. If M&A transactions are your business, you should have a tool like Jurimesh.”