Simmons Wavelength partner Drew Winlaw has been appointed as global large language model lead at Simmons & Simmons to head a six-person team responsible for looking at generative AI for the UK top 50 law firm’s fee-earners, its business services teams, and for clients.
Winlaw co-founded Wavelength with Peter Lee in 2016 and joined Simmons & Simmons as part of its acquisition of the legal engineering business in 2019. Since then, he has been partner and chief legal engineer of Simmons Wavelength. However, this new role will see him form a dedicated LLM team that will include a mixture of consultants from Wavelength and new hires.
The Wavelength consultants are Ben Ridgway, CTO of Simmons Wavelength (who was co-founder of transaction management platform Transact) and Simmons’ lead data scientist Daisy Mak, who has been focusing on this area since late last year. The team is recruiting for an LLM program manager; a cloud and dev ops engineer; and another data scientist.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Winlaw said: “It’s a fascinating role not just looking at generative AI for fee-earners and the law firm, but for our business services team and for in-house legal teams who are all scrambling to work out what to do right now.”
He adds: “People say that you should look at the problem and then decide what technology to apply, but this is slightly different technology in terms of its breadth, and it requires people to learn a new language to be able to have a constructive conversation about how this technology might impact their future. It’s a fascinating time. We’re trying to equip the firm with enough knowledge as to how we adjust as a firm.”
Winlaw says the priority is to get some foundational things in place and say: “Safety is my main focus, and client confidentiality. Those are the things we need to get right.”
caroline@legaltechnology.com
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