Law firms around the world are now taking generative AI seriously.
It’s not that they didn’t consider it important before, but most were characteristically cautious and slow. Now, the pace of technological advancement, combined with how quickly gen AI has changed corporate legal departments and what in-house counsel want—or don’t want—from their external legal advisers, has forced firms to see the writing on the wall: they need to adapt, and do it quickly.
Just in the last month, four Big Law firms—Latham & Watkins, Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, DLA Piper and Reed Smith—have hired technology specialists who have AI expertise for roles that did not previously exist. Other firms are also looking for similarly qualified candidates to fill new positions in what is turning out to be an emerging law firm AI talent war.
And all this hiring and attention to generative AI is not just taking place in the U.S. DLA Piper’s newly appointed chief data and AI officer is based in London. Canadian law firm Borden Ladner Gervais last week appointed a chief artificial intelligence officer who will be responsible for leading the firm’s AI strategy—a new role for the firm and the first such position among large Canadian firms. Also last week, leading Spanish law firm Garrigues, which has developed its own generative AI platform, announced a collaboration with Microsoft. In early May, Maples and Calder, the Maples Group’s law firm in Ireland, appointed a head of innovation, a new position for the firm, who will work with lawyers and clients to navigate and adopt AI technology.
Another leading Spanish firm, Cuatrecasas, has rolled out a generative artificial intelligence tool developed by Harvey AI, the ChatGPT-style platform adopted by firms such as Allen & Overy and Macfarlanes, for use at its Latin America offices in Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru. In Mexico, Von Wobeser y Sierra has launched a large language model chatbot for internal use. And Allens, one of Australia’s major transactional firms, built its own generative AI tool for internal use and continues to look for more ways to combine the datasets it has built up over many years with the growing capabilities of generative AI.
All this is good news, especially in an industry that is not known for readily embracing change. But in truth, firms don’t really have a choice.
In-house legal departments and the general counsel on whom law firms depend for work are adopting generative AI tools to conduct legal research, draft contracts and briefs, create summaries, analyze existing documents and determine risk—tasks they have traditionally handed off to outside counsel. With the right tools and in-house lawyers trained to use those tools, they can get that work done faster and cheaper than they would if they handed all that work off to outside counsel.
Who wants to pay a Big Law junior associate $600 an hour for 10 hours of work when an in-house lawyer can do it with the help of gen AI in half the time?
