Last week the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act came into force requiring US companies to provide more information and documents under disclosure than they do currently for M&As. Whilst the Act has been designed to promote competition, rather than inhibit it, this will increase the time and cost of compliance for companies from 1-3 days to approximately 2 to 3 weeks.
For African businesses looking to merge with US companies, this will significantly slow this process down.
Epiq, a leading global legal and compliance services platform has developed an HSR Discovery Services tool, with a first-of-its-kind AI technology Discovery Assistant to increase review speed, accuracy, defensibility, and cost efficiency for an HSR pre-merger filing. It does the following:
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Uncovers new information using a chat Q&A interface to interrogate the data by asking questions using natural language.
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Has the ability to analyse documents in any source language.
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Automated tagging of documents for responsiveness, privilege, and personal information.
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The ability to iterate responses for more complete results.
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Security and privacy with an AI model trained only with client data.
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Defensible metrics to support the process.
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Fast analysis with a throughput of 500,000 documents per hour.
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More complete and consistent results.
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Predictable and lower pricing
Erin Toomey, Vice President, Global Investigations Practice Group, Legal Solutions, at Epiq says: “The Federal Trade Commission’s new HSR rules significantly increase the time, cost, and complexity in completing a pre-merger filing. What once took a few days can now stretch to weeks. AI-enabled tools are not just a convenience but a necessity in addressing this regulatory shift and cutting through the complexity. For businesses and legal teams, this isn’t just about efficiency—it’s about completing a filing with speed, accuracy, and cost predictability.”