LawVision Principal Mark Medice sat down with Connor Acle, Co-Founder & CEO of Marveri, to get his perspective on the legal AI landscape; below are the highlights of that discussion.
Marveri: Transforming Legal Due Diligence Through AI
Marveri, an innovative legal AI startup with roots in MIT and Harvard, aims to transform how law firms handle corporate work and diligence in business transactions. Co-founded by Connor Acle, a former corporate and transactional lawyer, the company emerged from his firsthand frustration with traditional legal due diligence processes.
The company combines traditional machine learning algorithms with cutting-edge AI to address specific legal workflows, particularly in investments, mergers, and acquisitions.
Q: Can you tell us about your background as a practicing lawyer and what led you to found Marveri?
A: Regardless of whether I worked on small financings or large M&A deals, we’d consistently spend outsized effort just on document organization and initial review – tasks that, while critical, didn’t utilize our legal training and judgment. We always had tight timelines and high expectations from clients, but it never felt like we had the tools to truly understand and synthesize all the documents and risks to advise our clients fully. We founded Marveri to give corporate lawyers exactly those tools.
Q: What sets Marveri’s approach apart from other legal tech solutions?
A: Unlike AI products that generate text, our platform uses AI to simultaneously analyze and synthesize information across entire document sets. Our team, including our CTO, who dropped out of her PhD program at MIT to co-found the company, has deep expertise in traditional machine learning and advanced AI models. We’re not just applying generic AI – we’re building solutions for specific legal tasks that we can test and evaluate to ensure they deliver what lawyers want.
Q: Can you tell us more about what problem you’re solving in the transactional and M&A space?
Whether on the buy or sell-side of deals, lawyers get vast mountains of existing company documents that are often unorganized, incomplete, and without much context. Just figuring out what you have and don’t, what main issues are at play, and following up with the target company to track down additional documents or missing signatures can take weeks.
Q: How does this technology impact transaction timelines and value delivery?
A: Instead of this initial review bottlenecking deal progress, lawyers use Marveri to turn diligence into a deal accelerator. In a matter of minutes, Marveri can summarize and organize all the diligence documents, quickly showing what’s available, and then generate a supplemental request list of additional documents needed and signatures for the seller to track down. Buy-side counsel gets an immediate sense of the central business issues (like major contracts that may not be assignable or fundamental corporate governance documentation missing). Sell-side lawyers also use Marveri to prep their clients for sale and do an initial review of diligence documents to get ahead of issues before opening up the entire data room to the buy-side.
Q: There’s understandable concern about AI’s impact on law firm economics. How do you see this playing out with the billable hour model?
A: While AI certainly changes the efficiency equation, I don’t think it threatens the underlying business model. Many transactions already operate under pre-arranged budgets rather than pure hourly billing. More importantly, though, we see that clients are willing to pay more when they know that time is spent on high-value analysis and strategic advice rather than document organization and basic review. Marveri also often finds issues that would otherwise be missed or excluded from traditional diligence review, enabling the law firm to handle additional workstreams. And that’s played out on the ground – we haven’t seen our customers struggle to fill their hours when using Marveri. It’s typically the opposite. Associates are excited to use their new superpowers to spend more time going deeper in review to deliver output that genuinely “wows” their colleagues and clients.
Q: What’s your advice for law firm leaders evaluating AI implementation strategies?
A: First and foremost, review for data security and confidentiality requirements – this is non-negotiable. Pay attention to prohibitions on training both at the vendor level and for any foundation model provider they may use.
Once you’re fully confident there, avoid a one-size-fits-all approach. Each practice area and workflow have unique requirements and risk profiles. Start by identifying specific use cases where AI can add immediate value and analyze the risks and benefits for each.
Q: Looking ahead, how do you see AI reshaping the competitive landscape for law firms?
A: We’re seeing that firms that adopt the right tools are really able to gain a competitive advantage and “punch above their weight”. While AI usage will eventually be a baseline expectation for every firm, now is unique opportunity where thoughtful firms can leapfrog others that aren’t taking an intentional approach to this new wave of technology.
What’s particularly exciting is that we’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible. As AI technology evolves, firms that have built a strong foundation for AI adoption will be positioned to take advantage of new capabilities as they emerge.
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