:Harvey: in Practice: How Banking and Finance Teams Execute Transactions

Banking and finance transactions demand speed without sacrificing precision. Market terms evolve quickly, documentation is dense, and small misalignments early in a deal can cascade into delays, retrades, or disputes later on. Legal teams are expected to move at market pace while maintaining rigorous control over risk, precedent, and execution.

Harvey supports banking and finance lawyers across the lifecycle of a financing — from early market analysis and term sheet drafting, through diligence, negotiation, closing, and into ongoing facility management. By connecting precedent, deal documents, and analytical tools in one platform, Harvey helps teams surface what matters most, apply legal judgment faster, and stay aligned as transactions evolve.

Below are representative ways banking and finance teams use Harvey to manage and execute deals with confidence at each stage.

Stage 1: Initial Deal Preparations

Market Terms and Precedent Analysis

Harvey enables deal teams to review prior negotiated transactions and surface relevant precedent language, helping lawyers quickly assess where the market stands on key terms and tailor their approach accordingly. By leveraging vault review tables to extract structured deal data — and using Ask Harvey to query that information across prior transactions — teams gain a comprehensive view of how similar deals have been structured, reducing research time and ensuring advice is grounded in real market practice.

Drafting Commitment Letters and Term Sheets

Commitment letters and term sheets set the tone for the entire transaction. Harvey helps banking lawyers identify relevant precedent and produce structured drafts aligned with deal terms and strategy. Teams can integrate precedent libraries in Vault with the Harvey for Word Add-In and move from blank page to polished draft faster, ensuring early documents reflect both client objectives and market-tested language.

Stage 2: Due Diligence and Document Review

Red-Flag and Risk Identification

Due diligence often involves reviewing large volumes of agreements: supplier contracts, real property documents, litigation files, and more. Harvey can extract key terms and insights across these materials, surfacing potential risks or issues that require attention. This accelerates the diligence process, allowing teams to focus their expertise on analyzing flagged issues rather than sifting through documents manually.

At Bridgewater, legal teams use Harvey to review large volumes of complex agreements and systematically extract key terms and risk indicators. This allows attorneys to identify material issues early and reduce review timelines from weeks to days, while maintaining consistency across highly bespoke documents.

Resolution and Governing Document Review

Confirming borrower and guarantor authority to enter into a transaction requires careful review of organizational documents, resolutions, and certificates. With Harvey, teams can review and revise these materials more efficiently, ensuring all authority issues are identified and addressed before closing. For example, a vault review workflow can be used to extract information from the governing documents.

Stage 3: Drafting and Markups

Compare Loan Agreement to Term Sheet

Ensuring the loan agreement faithfully reflects the term sheet — and any post-execution agreed terms — is critical to avoiding disputes and delays. Harvey can compare drafts against the term sheet, flag inconsistencies, help teams revise documents to align with agreed terms, and identify the key areas for negotiation. This reduces the risk of errors slipping through and accelerates the path to execution.

Revise Loan Agreements

Loan agreement revisions often require balancing issues lists, precedent language, and previously negotiated provisions. With the Harvey for Word Add-In, lawyers can incorporate feedback and refine documents with direct access to the full context of the deal and the firm’s precedent library in Vault — reducing manual back-and-forth and helping teams move revisions forward more efficiently.

Stage 4: Negotiation

Issues List Preparation

Preparing a clear, comprehensive issues list based on loan agreement or security agreement redlines is essential to efficient client communication and negotiation. Harvey can generate draft issues lists from redlined documents that are ready for attorney review and client discussion. This helps teams prioritize the most consequential issues and align internally before engaging counterparties.

Analysis of Opposing Counsel Strategy

Understanding opposing counsel's patterns, tactics, and fallback positions can provide a meaningful strategic advantage. Harvey enables teams to analyze prior negotiations and precedent deals to surface insights into opposing counsel’s historical approach, helping lawyers anticipate where compromise is and isn’t likely.

Stage 5: Deal Management and Closing Preparations

Create Post-Closing Checklist

A comprehensive post-closing checklist ensures nothing falls through the cracks after the deal closes. Missing a filing deadline, overlooking a consent requirement, or failing to perfect security in a timely manner can expose clients to significant risk. Harvey Workflows help teams generate detailed checklists of each party's obligations, organizing requirements by responsible party, deadline, and priority. This systematic approach supports smooth post-closing execution and gives deal teams confidence that all deliverables are tracked and accounted for.

Stage 6: Facility Management and Ongoing Advisory

Draft Amendments and Waivers

As credit facilities evolve, amendments and waivers can be required to address changing borrower circumstances, financial performance, or market conditions. Drafting these documents requires a careful understanding of the original transaction terms, prior modifications, and the client's current objectives. Harvey helps lawyers draft based on prior deal precedent and client instructions, ensuring revisions are consistent with the transaction's history and aligned with the client's strategic goals.

Draft Joinders and Incremental Facilities

Joinder agreements and incremental facility documentation are often required as borrowers expand their operations, acquire new subsidiaries, or seek additional financing. These documents require updates to guarantees, security agreements, and schedules. Harvey can support the drafting of these complex documents, drawing on precedent forms and deal-specific terms to ensure consistency and accuracy. This accelerates the drafting process and reduces the risk of errors that could delay closing or create downstream issues.

Want to see how Harvey supports banking and finance teams at every stage of a transaction? Contact our team to learn more: