M&A Lawyer
Practise M&A law as the legal half of a Duely Tandem: an engine that does the grunt work, an engineer at your side, and your judgement setting the standard. No billable hours.
About Duely
Duely is the first AI-native legal service provider for M&A in the Benelux. Powered by technology we build ourselves, we deliver the M&A legal work for PE funds, family offices and corporate M&A teams, and deploy our technology through our API across VDR platforms and enterprise environments.
Clients instruct us as they would instruct a law firm and receive the finished work: data room preparation, gap analyses and full legal due diligence reports. Our AI engine does the heavy lifting, our legal experts direct and sign off on every deliverable, and we carry full responsibility for the output. We price per deliverable, not per billable hour.
Founded in Ghent by Michiel Van Lerbeirghe (former lawyer and GC) and Michiel De Koninck (AI engineer and legal-tech lead), we have raised €1.1 million in venture capital, and our technology is integrated directly into Sterling's global VDR platform. We are still small enough to fit in one room, so you will directly shape how the company is built.
Our values
- Excellence in execution. An eye for detail in deliverables, both external and internal. Crossing your t's and dotting your i's.
- Everybody sales. Everyone has the growth of the business in mind.
- Take ownership. Our culture allows everyone to speak their mind: do so, and take ownership where you know you can make a difference.
- Be brutally honest: no ego. To grow, as a team and individually, we need to give each other constant and useful feedback, respectfully.
About the role
Every Duely deal is run by a Duely Tandem: a legal expert and an AI engineer working side by side. As M&A Lawyer you are the legal half of that tandem. You own the legal judgement on everything that leaves the building: what a red flag really is, what a finding must say, and when a deliverable is good enough to carry our name.
The engineer and the technology do the grunt work of reading thousands of documents, extracting and drafting. What no engine can do is know what matters on this deal for this client. That is you. And because every call you make also sharpens the engine, your judgement compounds across every future deal instead of evaporating into billable hours.
Responsibilities
- Own the legal output. Review and shape data room reviews, gap analyses and due diligence reports. You decide when the work is client-ready.
- Set the standard. Define what a good finding, a fair risk qualification and a solid report look like, then work with the engineer to make that standard reproducible across every deal.
- Work in tandem. You bring the judgement, the engineer brings the scale, and together you decide how the next deal runs better.
- Sit across from the client. Scope the work with PE funds and corporate M&A teams, handle Q&A, and defend findings under scrutiny.
- Build the playbooks. Turn how you practise M&A into repeatable processes.
Requirements
- You know M&A practice. Experience in transactional or corporate law: due diligence, data rooms, deal pressure.
- You have judgement, not just knowledge. You can call what is material and what is noise, and stand behind that call.
- You want leverage, not hours. The billable-hour treadmill is exactly what you are ready to leave. Your judgement should scale beyond your own time.
- You are curious about the technology. No coding required, but you want to understand how AI produces legal work, and where it fails.
- You want to be in the room. This is on-site in Ghent, next to the Duely engineers. The tandem is the whole point.
- Bonus: experience at a strong M&A or corporate practice and exposure to legal tech.
Why Duely
- A fixed salary and equity through our ESOP. No billable targets, no hour registration.
- Leverage very few lawyers ever get. An engine and an engineer multiply your judgement across every deal we run. You shape how M&A legal work is done instead of billing it hour by hour.
- A profession being rebuilt. M&A legal work is being reinvented right now. Help decide what it looks like in an AI-native world.
- Free lunch. Oh, you thought there was no such thing? There is at Duely. All meals at our office are paid for because we love to fuel your engine. MVL's tuna salad is quite legendary, Simon's yoghurt is quite dairy.
The team posing in their plant-filled (bit problematic) kitchen. LTR: Lucas, Simon, MVL, Arne, MDK
Ready to build with us?
Head over to the application tab and tell us about yourself. We read every application. What matters most is that you see the future of this work the way we do: not building tools for lawyers, but doing the work itself, with engineers and lawyers in the same room.
Prefer something less formal? Mail us directly at careers@duely.ai.