How Mallesons Uses :Harvey: to Move Complex Financing Negotiations Forward

Key Highlights

• An independent, top-tier Australian law firm that regularly represents bank syndicates, borrowers, and corporate treasury teams
• A lender syndicate was misaligned with borrower expectations
• Harvey turned lender comments into a table of issues
• Lawyers reach critical issues in about an hour of work that would previously have taken days
• Harvey analyzes and extracts insights from 20 years of client work in less than ten minutes

About Mallesons

Mallesons is an independent, top-tier Australian law firm with nearly two centuries of history and offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Canberra, and Singapore. A team within its Banking and Finance practice documents loans for lenders and borrowers, with a focus on real estate finance and corporate treasury teams. The team regularly represents large bank and non-bank syndicates, with some client relationships spanning over 20 years.

Opportunity

When a borrower with a strong sponsor sought better terms on financing for real estate assets in Sydney and across Australia, Mallesons acted for the lending syndicate. The firm led negotiations on a new set of financing documents. Each of the lenders brought its own processes and credit requirements, leaving the team to determine the priorities for each one and bring the syndicate into agreement.

“We had 8 to 10 lenders on one side and the borrower on the other side thinks that they’re agreed about everything, and they’re not actually agreed at all,” said Natalie Halpern, Partner at Mallesons.

A good outcome leaves the borrower happy, and in Australia’s small market, a bad one can cost a lender its place in the syndicate.

Treasury clients bring a different kind of pressure. When a business commits to a transaction, its treasury team has to secure the funding by a fixed date and confirm that the deal won’t breach a covenant on any other debt platform. A deal of that kind often comes with a three-week deadline, and for long-standing clients, the answer can sit across hundreds of documents and loan terms that have evolved over decades.

“The clients come to us for consistent, accurate and timely advice,” said Ken Astridge, Partner at Mallesons. “When it happens, it happens fast, and it needs to be on time for delivery. There’s a lot of pressure on getting it right.”

Solution

Harvey meets both pressures head-on: finding where the syndicate actually disagrees, and getting treasury clients a sound answer from decades of documents on a compressed timeline. In both cases, the platform handles the volume, and lawyers check everything it produces.

One Table for the Entire Syndicate

Instead of checking each bank’s feedback against the loan document by hand, Mallesons’ lawyers put everything the lenders sent, from balloon comments and emails to dot points and markups, into Harvey. Harvey returned a table with columns for issue, lender position, and outcome, which the team then compared across the syndicate.

“Harvey turned that into a very clear set of issues that made it very obvious where the commercial tension was arising in that deal,” said Halpern.

Finding the Real Question in 20 Years of Documents

Today, Astridge routinely puts several lawyers on a transaction to iterate with Harvey across a client’s set of hundreds of documents and identify key items. Harvey footnotes each clause it pulls, so lawyers can accept or discard each issue at the source. In Astridge’s experience, treasury work that may have taken days now takes about an hour to reach the point where lawyers can start testing Harvey’s analysis.

“The question that often comes to us from the client is quite often not the question that they need to be asking,” said Astridge. “It’s not until you start iterating with the documents that you really start to identify the critical issues.”

In another instance, Mallesons lawyers used Harvey to analyze 20 years of one client’s work in approximately five minutes. “It identifies things that happened five years ago that I’d forgotten had happened,” said Astridge.

Judgment and Time Back for Juniors

Halpern views Harvey as a way for lawyers to deliver excellent work product without as many late-night sessions, and this extends to the firm’s junior lawyers as well. She sees the combination of Harvey and the firm’s commitment to strong verification practices as an opportunity for juniors to learn the nuances of the profession in a completely transformed industry.

Astridge’s junior and mid-level lawyers made it known they wanted to spend their time on hard analysis. Tedious document reviews stood in their way.

Previously, the firm’s juniors would routinely spend days reviewing hundreds of documents to find relevant information. Now, equipped with Harvey, they can get to the heart of a problem quickly and redirect their bandwidth toward their analysis.

“I think that's what excites me most,” said Astridge. “Just looking at them and seeing how excited they are about what Harvey enables them to do.”

Impact

The biggest change is timing and its impact on client value. Mallesons’ lawyers now reach the real points of disagreement, and the questions clients actually need answered, earlier in a matter — giving them more time to proactively guide their clients and associated parties to appropriate solutions or compromises.

Results

• Key negotiating points for the lending syndicate finalized with minimum input
• Critical treasury client issues highlighted across hundreds of documents in roughly an hour
• Harvey analyzes 20 years of client work in five minutes

With very little input, the syndicate issues table was ready to share with the borrower. Its contents eventually became a set of negotiating points.

According to Halpern, surfacing important issues early lets the team focus on what matters most and bring faster resolution for clients. “It gets sent across to the other side. It then becomes clear what the borrower wants to accept and what they don’t. And that then moves that transaction forward in a way that’s really meaningful.”

For treasury matters, work that may have taken days takes about an hour to reach the point where lawyers can start challenging Harvey’s analysis. The effort results in an easily digestible client memo.

“Of all of the tech advances that we’ve made in our industry, this is the most exciting that I’ve seen,” said Astridge, a 32-year practitioner whose juniors share that excitement.

Halpern sees similar syndicate negotiations across all of the lender-borrower deals the team manages. In her view, Harvey’s role is indisputable.

“Harvey will be relevant to that process,” said Halpern. “Every time.”