How Rutgers & Posch coordinates multi-practice due diligence in half the time

Rutgers & Posch built their reputation on "big law expertise in a boutique setting", delivering the same quality as international firms, but with leaner teams and faster execution. With 30-35 M&A deals a year, they needed due diligence that matched their pace.

About Rutgers & Posch

Rutgers & Posch is an Amsterdam-based boutique law firm with a clear positioning: "Big law expertise in a boutique setting." Their 45 lawyers and staff deliver the quality clients expect from international firms, but with more direct partner contact, leaner teams, and faster execution.

Their corporate M&A practice is a core part of the firm, handling 30-35 deals annually, primarily for private equity clients, but also for corporates and listed companies. Most partners came from big law backgrounds, bringing that expertise to a more efficient model.

The challenge? Maintaining that pace with boutique-sized teams.

The problem

"The structuring of the data room is often a problem," explains partner Bas. "Especially where clients do not have a good advisor on the sales side that helps structure the data room. You sometimes find a mess or you don't know where is what."

But structure wasn't the only issue. Volume was overwhelming. In one recent deal, associate Hanna was assigned 200 documents just for the corporate review. "Normally you would print everything and then take a look at what's really relevant," she explains.

The coordination overhead was equally painful. With multiple practice groups involved, corporate, employment, finance, pensions, lots of time went into "discussing who's going to look at what, and who's responsible for what folder." Documents would get assigned, then need to be reassigned when they turned out to be more relevant for another practice group.

The manual workflow made it worse. "Normally you would write it down somewhere or just take notes on paper. Then after that you start drafting the report, but then you have to look at all the risks again."

A typical due diligence took a month or more. For a firm doing 30-35 deals a year with lean teams, that doesn’t scale.

Assigning, reviewing, reporting, all in one place

Rutgers & Posch didn't jump at the first AI solution. The team tested around 10 different AI tools for legal work before settling on Jurimesh. It now uses Jurimesh to drive workflow efficiency and coordination.

“We start by assigning all documents to various team members,” Hanna explains. “It really helps with structuring the data room and just knowing who should focus on what.”

The reassignment feature solves a common handoff problem: “Sometimes you review a document that in the first instance looks like it’s for the corporate team, but then it appears to be relevant for the employment team as well. You can assign it to another colleague, and they get a notification.”

As a result, fewer meetings are needed to allocate documents, and there’s no uncertainty about review status. “You mark it as reviewed, which really helps with efficiency. You just know what to look at and what not.”

Trust in the output is key. “I was surprised by the risks that I spotted and that were also spotted by Jurimesh,” Hanna notes. “They really matched, and that gives comfort for using the tool.”

Jurimesh flags legal risks and categorizes them by severity, giving lawyers a head start before they even open the document. Bas highlights what makes it actually usable AI: “The way the results are presented makes it really easy to filter them, to ignore them, to raise them as an issue in the report. That saves a lot of time and makes it a really usable tool.”

Unlocking new economic possibilities

Bas recalls one case: "One of our clients indicated that they didn't really see the need to do due diligence because it was a really small business and the information was clear. They said, 'Let's just save up on costs and not do the due diligence.'"

His response? "I offered to do due diligence with Jurimesh at a really low fixed price. We ran the whole data room through Jurimesh and gave the results to the client. We did not do our own full analysis, this is the analysis of Jurimesh."

After filtering some risks, they had minimal work but the client still had a helpful overview of risks they otherwise would have missed. Jurimesh came up with several relevant issues. The deal got proper diligence at a fraction of the cost.

Results

"Due diligence that ordinarily would have cost a month or even more, we can now do in two weeks or even less."

The time savings compound across practice groups. "We can spend more time on looking at the real issues of the case, really analyzing those, instead of only flagging them," Bas explains. "Coming up with a real bridge from due diligence to transaction documents."

For Hanna, the benefit is comprehensive review without cost blowout. "You cannot look at everything, well, you can, but it's not good for the client because you're going to spend a lot of time. So you have to choose. I think in the future we can just look at a lot more and have a much more complete view of everything."

The firm's "peace of mind" metric improved too. "You know that everything is looked at and who's responsible for what and nothing gets lost. Normally a lot of documents are spread through a lot of folders and it can be difficult to know who's responsible for what."