How a Leading Nordic M&A Practice Cut Deal Structuring Time by 40%

The firm in question is one of the Nordic region's most established full-service practices, with a transactional department that consistently ranks among the top tier in Scandinavia. Their M&A group — roughly forty lawyers spread across Stockholm, Oslo, and Copenhagen — advises on everything from mid-market acquisitions to multi-billion-euro cross-border transactions. For decades, the team's approach to deal structuring relied on the same fundamental workflow: associates gathered entity data from data rooms, company registers, and counterparty counsel, then manually assembled corporate structure charts in a combination of Excel, PowerPoint, and occasionally Visio.

The limitations of this approach were well understood but long tolerated. Spreadsheets could capture the data, but they could not show it. A partner reviewing a target's corporate group had to mentally reconstruct the ownership hierarchy from rows and columns, tracing holding percentages across tabs and hoping that the version they were reading was current. When deals involved complex multi-jurisdictional structures — as Nordic cross-border transactions frequently do — the resulting diagrams were unwieldy, difficult to update, and almost impossible to present clearly to clients or counterparties.

The breaking point came during the acquisition of a Scandinavian industrial conglomerate spanning 80 entities across seven jurisdictions. The target's corporate structure existed only in a patchwork of spreadsheets, PDF org charts produced years earlier, and the institutional memory of a handful of senior associates at the seller's counsel. Three associates spent two full weeks mapping the group — and by the time their diagram was finished, two subsidiaries had already been restructured as part of pre-closing reorganisation steps. The diagram was outdated before it was complete.

The firm's head of M&A had encountered Juristic Structure at a legal technology conference in Helsinki and had heard positive reports from a colleague at a competing practice who had piloted it on a recent transaction. She proposed a trial: the next mid-market deal would use Structure alongside the firm's traditional workflow, allowing the team to compare the two approaches directly. The M&A practice committee approved the pilot with cautious optimism.

Onboarding was remarkably swift. A dedicated session with Juristic's implementation team took less than three hours, after which two senior associates spent a single afternoon importing the existing entity data from a new transaction's data room. They watched as Structure rendered the entire corporate group as an interactive diagram. Ownership percentages, jurisdictions, board compositions, share classes, and holding structures were all visible at a glance. One associate later described the moment as 'seeing the deal for the first time' — despite having spent days reading the same data in spreadsheet form.

The impact on day-to-day deal execution was immediate and measurable. Associates could click into any entity to see its full details, trace ownership chains up and down the hierarchy, and flag entities that required regulatory clearance or had pending compliance issues. When the counterparty proposed a restructuring of the target's Nordic holding companies midway through negotiations, the team modelled three alternative structures in Structure's workspace and presented them side-by-side during a video call — something that would have previously required days of manual diagramming and multiple rounds of email with the design team.

The negotiation dynamics shifted in subtle but meaningful ways. Partners found that sharing a live, interactive structure diagram during calls changed the tenor of discussions. Instead of walking counterparties through static slides and fielding questions about details that were not on the current page, both sides could explore the structure simultaneously. Misunderstandings about entity relationships — a surprisingly common source of friction in complex M&A negotiations — were resolved in real time. One partner observed that 'the diagram became the language of the negotiation.'

Training and adoption across the broader M&A team proceeded faster than anyone expected. The firm had budgeted for a three-month rollout; in practice, most associates were using Structure independently within two weeks. The user interface was intuitive enough that formal training beyond the initial session was largely unnecessary. Partners, who are notoriously resistant to new technology, engaged with the tool once they saw how it transformed client presentations. The firm's IT department reported that Structure generated fewer support tickets in its first quarter than any software deployment in the past five years.

Deal structuring time fell by 40% on the pilot transaction, measured from the point of data room access to the delivery of a complete, partner-reviewed corporate structure diagram. The improvement was driven by three factors: the elimination of manual diagramming, the ability to update the structure in real time as new information emerged, and the reduction in back-and-forth between associates and partners about how to represent complex ownership chains. On subsequent transactions, the efficiency gains held steady, with some deals seeing even greater improvements.

The firm has since rolled out Structure across all M&A engagements, making it a standard part of the deal toolkit alongside their document management system and virtual data room platform. Partners report that the tool has fundamentally changed client conversations: instead of walking through static slides in a boardroom, they share live diagrams that clients — including board members with no legal background — can explore themselves. The head of M&A noted that juniors now spend less time on mechanical charting and more time on the legal analysis that actually moves deals forward, which has had a positive effect on both work quality and associate satisfaction.

The internal response led to broader adoption. The firm's corporate governance practice began using Structure to maintain standing corporate group charts for ongoing client relationships, updating them continuously rather than producing one-off diagrams for each engagement. The tax advisory team adopted the tool to visualise holding structures and model the impact of proposed reorganisations on withholding tax exposure. What began as an M&A pilot became a firm-wide platform within six months.

Client feedback has been uniformly positive. Several clients have commented that the structure diagrams they receive from the firm are now markedly clearer and more useful than those from other advisors. One general counsel at a Nordic industrial company described the diagrams as 'the first time I could actually explain our group structure to our board without apologising for the complexity of the slide deck.' The firm now includes live Structure links in their engagement deliverables as standard practice.

Perhaps most telling, the firm's largest institutional client — a Nordic private equity house with a portfolio spanning twelve countries — has since adopted Juristic independently, citing the clarity of the diagrams they received during their last three transactions as the deciding factor. The PE house's head of legal told the firm that the Structure diagrams were 'the best visual representation of a target's corporate group we have ever received from external counsel.' That endorsement, unsolicited and from a client known for exacting standards, may be the strongest validation of the firm's decision to adopt the platform.

Looking ahead, the firm is exploring deeper integration of Structure with their due diligence workflows. The M&A team is working with Juristic to develop a process where entity-level due diligence findings are attached directly to nodes in the structure diagram, creating a single visual workspace where the entire deal team can see both the structure and the status of diligence for each entity. The head of M&A describes this as 'the next logical step — making the diagram not just a picture of the deal, but the operating system of the deal.'