Unilever Saves 6,500 Hours and Cuts M&A Contract Review Time 70% with DocuSign AI

Unilever needed to review roughly 18,000 contracts across 20 essential data points as part of due diligence for an M&A transaction. A full manual review was estimated to require a substantial amount of work, equivalent to a large full-time team, prompting the company to look for a faster, technology-driven approach.

Unilever deployed DocuSign Insight, an AI contract review platform already integrated into its tech stack, using NLP, machine learning, and rules-based logic to extract data from agreements. The team built a hybrid workflow in which AI performed the initial extraction of relevant data points, human reviewers validated the outputs, and senior lawyers ran an additional quality check. Custom logic incorporating a list of all relevant Unilever entities was added to the platform to improve identification of those entities during party review.

The AI-assisted process saved approximately 6,500 human hours compared to a full manual review and completed the review about 70% faster. Unilever was able to review 20 times more documents than a manual review would have covered, at a similar cost and in a shorter timeframe, while data accuracy increased by 18% compared to human-only review.

• A hybrid AI-plus-human-QA workflow (AI extraction, human validation, senior lawyer sign-off) scaled contract volume without sacrificing accuracy.
• Customizing the platform with Unilever's own entity list improved extraction precision for party identification.
• Large-scale M&A due diligence that would be impractical manually (18,000 contracts, requiring extensive manual effort) became feasible on a compressed timeline and budget.