"Centari is proving to be a core part of how G+T delivers value today, and how we’ll continue delivering value in our next chapter as a firm." — Rachael Bassil, Partner Corporate Advisory
About Gilbert + Tobin
Gilbert + Tobin is one of Australia's most prominent independent law firms, with over 500 lawyers across Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. The firm holds a market-leading position in private and public M&A.
Among the many large, complex deals they’ve advised on is the $39 billion Afterpay/Block transaction, the largest technology M&A deal in Australian history. Recognized by the Financial Times as the Most Innovative Law Firm in Asia-Pacific two years running, G+T has built its reputation on combining deep transactional expertise with a demonstrated commitment to invest strategically in technology.
The Challenge: Tapping into Deeper Knowledge
G+T’s deal volume represents an enormous reservoir of institutional knowledge. The firm’s leadership recognized that if they could capture strategic insights from transactional documents systematically and at scale, it would transform how they advise clients, win mandates, and maximize the impact of their unique vantage point on the market.
Accomplishing this, though, was easier said than done.
When a matter concluded, the agreements were filed away in a document management system. The deeper knowledge of the negotiated terms, risk allocations, and structural decisions would continue to live in the minds of the lawyers who worked on the deal.
Gareth Cantin, G+T’s Head of Knowledge and Practice Innovation, explained that law firms have long sought to provide clients and lawyers with insights into market-standard positions and drafting. Having visibility across the firm's deal experience allows lawyers to advise clients on market norms, standard risk allocations, and how specific terms compare to broader trends. It also allows the team to leverage deal experience across the firm to provide tried and tested solutions to clients when similar issues arise across deals. It‘s critical that the insights can be extracted and packaged in a way which protects the underlying transaction data and respects the controls imposed on that information. That kind of intelligence is invaluable in negotiations and drafting.
G+T invested early in approaches to capture deal data, including a comprehensive private M&A data initiative tracking key data points per transaction. But they still faced a fundamental problem familiar to every large transactional practice: the people closest to the knowledge were the ones with the least time to codify it. The sheer volume of complex data associated with each deal, combined with the rapid pace of new and ongoing matters, made consistent firmwide data capture difficult to sustain at scale.
The firm also assessed general-purpose AI tools alongside legacy contract review platforms. These were sufficient for more basic document review and summarization tasks but fell short on extracting complex information from sophisticated transactional documents. G+T needed an AI solution purpose-built for the complexity of real deal work.
The Solution: G+T Dealex, Powered by Centari
G+T set out to build something that no off-the-shelf tool could offer: a proprietary deal intelligence system calibrated to the firm's jurisdiction, specific practice areas, matter types, and data needs. The result is “G+T Dealex,” powered by Centari's deal intelligence platform and deployed across the firm's M&A practices. G+T branded the system for a reason: G+T Dealex is a firm-owned strategic data asset. “We saw an opportunity to build a genuine competitive advantage for the firm,” said Rachael Bassil, Partner and sponsor for the G+T Dealex project at G+T. “G+T Dealex isn’t a productivity tool. It’s a proprietary intelligence layer that gets more valuable with every transaction we close."
At G+T Dealex’s core is the Centari Deal Reasoning Engine. The engine uses patent-pending technology to process complex agreements the way a trained attorney would. It analyzes documents in logical stages, traces defined terms, maps conditional logic, and reasons across related deal documents. By capturing how provisions reference and depend on each other, it provides structured, citation-backed deal data that lawyers can trust.
The Deal Reasoning Engine eschews a one-size-fits-all extraction model for a bespoke approach. Centari's Applied Legal Research team, which includes lawyers who previously practiced at firms like Kirkland & Ellis, McCarthy Tétrault, and Dechert, worked alongside G+T to create and define taxonomies carrying the specific data points relevant to the firm's matter types and practice areas. The G+T team described this hands-on model building as Centari's "secret sauce.”
Naomi Swalve, Legal Product Lead for Centari, said that accuracy was key: "In transactional practice, the standard is precision. If the data is wrong, the advice is wrong. As with all of our customers, our Applied Legal Research team worked alongside the G+T team to ensure what comes out of the platform reflects what senior lawyers and their clients would expect to see."
The platform provides a transparent workflow for verification. Lawyers can view the underlying source content, check citations, and confirm or edit extracted data points. That process creates the kind of audit trail that a firm built on accuracy requires.
The Results: Faster, More Complete Deal Data
The impact was immediate.
"For a deal with 200 data points, it used to take a full day to extract this information with confidence," said Gareth Cantin, G+T Head of Knowledge and Practice Innovation. "With Centari, it’s only an hour the first time, and even faster the second time."
An even more significant shift came in the form of completion rates. Rather than requiring associates to invest scarce free time between client matters to populate deal sheets, Centari performs the initial extraction automatically and presents structured data for attorney verification. In doing so, the bottleneck of manual entry that undermined the previous system was effectively eliminated. G+T Dealex has made capturing deal data a standard part of the workflow, not an occasional “time permitting” effort.
With G+T Dealex now deployed across the firm's M&A practice, the firm has acquired capabilities extending well beyond data capture:
- Precedent search and drafting support. Lawyers can filter the firm's deal history by client, sector, target, or deal team to find relevant precedent in seconds. From there, they can pinpoint a specific clause from a specific type of transaction to use as a drafting reference.
- Data-backed negotiation support. When advising clients on whether to accept or push back on a particular provision, lawyers can now reference how analogous terms were handled across the firm's full deal history on an anonymized and aggregated basis. A data-backed assertion like "75% of comparable transactions in this sector included this type of clause" carries a different weight than anecdotal experience alone.
The Future of G+T: Compounding Intelligence
G+T's investment in Centari is an example of how AI for the legal sector extends beyond mere workflow augmentation and efficiency. Every deal that G+T adds to G+T Dealex expands the firm's compounding intelligence layer of negotiated structures, risk allocations, and market terms.
As the firm’s proprietary data assets grow, so does the distance between G+T and firms that have not made a similar investment. More deal flow generates more data. More data enables more informed and strategic counsel. And superior counsel means winning more mandates.
"Our clients come to us because we understand their markets better than anyone. That means being able to draw on the full depth of our transaction history across sectors, deal structures, and market cycles, not just the deals a particular team happened to work on," said Bassil. "Centari enables that capability at a scale that wasn't possible before. It’s proving to be a core part of how G+T delivers value today, and how we’ll continue delivering value in our next chapter as a firm."
