What 6,200 Matters Reveal About Running Transactions

By Rob MacAdam, CPO, Legatics.

Ask most transactional partners where the work on a deal happens, and you’ll get a confident answer: at signing. Closing day is the high-pressure moment, the late-night call, the bundle being chased across three jurisdictions, the senior associate doing final checks under the partner’s eye. It’s the part of the deal that gets attention, gets the stories told about it and gets celebrated when it closes clean.

But it isn’t where most of the work actually happens.

When we looked at over 6,200 matters running through transaction management at law firms across the UK, Europe, the US and Asia, the pattern was consistent across deal types and across firms. The bulk of transactional activity occurs well before execution. Closing is the conclusion, not the main event.

This sounds obvious when you say it. In practice, it isn’t how most firms organise themselves to manage transactions.

Where the work actually sits

Most of what determines whether a deal goes smoothly happens in the weeks and months between engagement and signing – establishing the workstreams, tracking conditions precedent, coordinating across borrower and lender counsel, managing the dozens of documents that need to land in the right state with the right signatories in the right order. The closing meeting is the moment all of that becomes visible. It is not the moment most of it happens.

But the tooling, the partner attention and the operational rigour at most firms remain disproportionately concentrated on execution. Pre-execution work sits in email, spreadsheets and personal trackers maintained by individual associates. It is largely invisible to anyone not actively on the deal, and almost always invisible to clients.

That mismatch – work concentrated pre-close, attention concentrated at close – is where the time, the risk and the partner anxiety leak.

The cost of managing only closing

The firms that treat transaction management as a closing problem pay for it in several places. Status questions from clients pull associates off other work, because nobody can see deal progress without rebuilding the picture by hand. Partners discover problems late, because the early stages of the deal are running in private inboxes and don’t surface until something is already overdue. New associates are slow to become productive, because every deal looks bespoke when it isn’t. And the client experience is reactive – they hear from the firm when something has gone wrong, rather than seeing where things are when they want to see.

None of this is news. What the data shows is how often it still describes the median firm. The minority of firms running structured transaction management across the full lifecycle look measurably different – fewer status-chasing emails, earlier identification of bottlenecks, faster onboarding for new joiners, and a client-facing surface that doesn’t require a partner to compile a manual update each Friday.

—

—

A way to locate your firm

The pattern across the 6,200 matters resolved into a five-tier picture of how firms are running transactions today.

At foundation, transaction management is in use for specific, high-visibility stages. Pre-execution work still largely lives in email and spreadsheets. At developing, task lists and basic document management are in use, with some centralisation of deal work. At scaling, lists and documents sit alongside live client access – clients can see deal status without asking. At established, every matter is structured the same way from day one and obligations are centralised; closing becomes the natural conclusion to a process that was always running. At advanced, knowledge is captured and reused across deals, client reporting is automated and new associates are productive from their first matter.

Most firms cluster around developing or scaling. The work to move up a tier is real but not heroic – and the gap in operational performance between the bottom two and the top two tiers is the part of the picture that should make senior partners pay attention.

The AI consideration

This matters more now than it did 18 months ago, because AI is now sitting on top of all of this.

The real bottleneck for legal AI is not model quality – it is what the model can see and what the model can do. AI can summarise the document on screen. It can draft a clause. It cannot reach into a process that isn’t structured anywhere it can see, and it cannot act in the systems where the work actually happens. The connectivity half of that problem is being addressed by emerging standards like the Model Context Protocol, now gathering momentum across the legal stack. The structure half is the one the maturity data exposes. If the underlying transaction process isn’t legible, no amount of connectivity makes AI useful on it.

That is why the maturity question and the AI question are converging. AI applied to deals running across email, spreadsheets and individual trackers can only do so much, because there is nothing structured for it to operate on. Firms that have built structured pre-execution discipline will find that AI accelerates work that is already well organised. Firms that haven’t will find that better models do not fix an unstructured deal.

A starting point

For most firms, the useful question isn’t where they want to be in three years. It’s where they actually sit now, what the deals running through the firm right now would tell an outside observer, and which one tier upward looks like a concrete six-month programme rather than a transformation deck.

The full report sets out the data, the five hallmarks of the most advanced firms and the cost of managing only closing. Download ‘The Transaction Maturity Report’ here.

[ This is a sponsored thought leadership article by Legatics for Artificial Lawyer. ]