This Hong Kong-headquartered international law firm, with over 220 lawyers across offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, and London, handled some of the most complex cross-border M&A transactions in Asia. Their corporate team managed an average of 45 active transactions at any time, each requiring due diligence reviews of 2,000 to 15,000 documents spanning multiple jurisdictions, languages, and legal systems.
Associate lawyers spent an average of 380 hours per transaction on document review — reading contracts, identifying risk clauses, flagging compliance issues, and compiling findings into due diligence reports. A post-transaction audit revealed that 18% of material risk factors identified in retrospective analysis had been present in reviewed documents but missed during initial review, exposing the firm to professional liability concerns.
The firm had evaluated three international legal AI platforms but found them inadequate for their practice. These platforms were trained primarily on English common law documents and could not handle the multilingual, multi-jurisdictional nature of Asian M&A transactions, which routinely involved documents in English, Mandarin, Cantonese legal terminology, and occasionally Bahasa Malaysia and Japanese. The firm needed a solution that understood the nuances of Asian business law.
Pertama Partners conducted an AI Readiness Audit that analyzed the firm's document review workflows, existing technology infrastructure, and the institutional knowledge embedded in 15 years of completed transaction files — over 18,000 due diligence reports with annotated risk classifications. This represented a training dataset of extraordinary value that no generic legal AI could replicate.
Our AI Pilot Program built a custom document analysis system using a fine-tuned multilingual large language model capable of processing documents in English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Bahasa Malaysia. The system was trained on the firm's own annotated corpus to identify and classify risk factors across 47 categories specific to Asian cross-border transactions, including PRC regulatory approvals, Hong Kong listing rule implications, and ASEAN foreign ownership restrictions. It generated risk heat maps, cross-document inconsistency alerts, and draft risk narratives for associate review.
Executive Training sessions with the firm's partnership addressed governance protocols for AI use in client matters, including client disclosure obligations, quality assurance workflows, and professional responsibility considerations. Team Training helped associates shift from reading every document word-by-word to a higher-value review workflow where they validated AI-identified risks, investigated flagged inconsistencies, and focused their expertise on complex judgment calls.
"Every legal AI vendor showed us demos with simple English contracts. Pertama Partners understood that our work involves Mandarin share pledge agreements, Hong Kong listing rule analysis, and Indonesian land title reviews — often in the same deal. They built for our reality."— David Chan, Managing Partner
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