Closing plans pulled from the documents
Tasks, parties and dates are already in the deal pack. The checklist should be drafted from there, then edited.
Harish Deivanayagam · 5 minutes
Corporate lawyers still build closing checklists by copying last year’s plan and then reading this year’s documents to see what they missed. The tasks were in the drafts the whole time: who delivers what, by when, to whom, and which condition it satisfies.
The draft
The agent reads the deal pack and proposes the plan: tasks, parties, deadlines, and the clause each task came from. Lawyers edit. They do not start from a blank table or from a cousin deal that had a different structure.
A task without a source clause is marked as the lawyer’s addition, so the plan does not pretend the documents required it.
After signing
The same list is what completion tracks against. A condition that moved in a turn of the documents updates the plan instead of living as a comment in someone’s inbox.
This is a narrow product. It does not “do the deal.” It stops the copy-paste, and it keeps the checklist tied to the papers that will be checked on the day.