UK law firm Kingsley Napley today (9 April) formally announced its collaboration with behavioural science AI startup Let’s Think, which helps law firms codify and unlock their knowledge to make it available across the firm. A pilot programme is up and running, with a firmwide rollout expected later this year. Let’s Think is the brainchild of founder and CEO Wendy Jephson, a lawyer and business psychologist who sold her previous fintech business Sybenetix to Nasdaq in 2017, becoming head of Nasdaq’s R&D function.
Kingsley Napley and Let’s Think started working together in 2024, to see how they could apply Behavioural Science AI to the legal industry to solve some of the key problems that law firms face. We already semi-announced the collaboration following LawTechUK’s GenAI conference, where Jephson spoke.
Six senior Kingsley Napley litigators have kicked off the collaboration by working with Let’s Think behavioural scientists to share their knowledge and experience so it can be codified into a continuous workflow tool that will be the core engine of the product. This product will be refined, tested and populated with a wider group of senior and junior lawyers in the months ahead, before final launch across the firm expected later this year.
Let’s Think uses “proprietary behavioural science AI conversational UI” to help experts reflect on their thinking and capture and visualise complex thought processes. It uses machine learning to organise expert knowledge into the ‘legal brain of the firm’ and gives team members access at the point of need.
Sarah Harris, director of innovation and knowledge at Kingsley Napley, said: “Much of the narrative around the use of AI within the legal sector is about what people can get the technology to do and how closely it can replicate more routine legal tasks. Whilst that is, of course, an important part of any AI strategy, we wanted to look beyond that to what it means existentially for lawyers. We asked: ‘What is it about our lawyers that our clients find value in?’
“With a firm like Kingsley Napley, it is the fact that their lawyer has a great deal of lived experience of dealing with similar disputes or situations and can therefore help clients practically navigate their matter. Our aim is to leverage and democratise that intellectual capital within our business, to amplify and fast-track the value to our own people and therefore our clients. If we can use technology to enable greater and earlier exposure to legal decision-making we can look again at how we provide value and how it is priced.”
Wendy Jephson, CEO and co-founder of Let’s Think who is a dual qualified lawyer, business psychologist, and serial tech entrepreneur, comments: “From our first meeting, Sarah understood how a centralised legal brain built on Kingsley Napley’s real-world expertise could improve training, professional development, and client service across the firm.
“Senior employees at law firms have a wealth of expert knowledge yet research shows 90% of this ‘tacit knowledge’ is unwritten, which means it’s lost when people retire or leave. Let’s Think aims to close this gap with ‘The Knowledge Exchange’ – an easy-to-use tool that automates expert knowledge elicitation without impacting billable time, then stores and organises it so that it can be easily accessed by others working in any office or remote location.
“By making ‘invisible thinking’ visible, The Knowledge Exchange helps law firms better understand how to use experts and their expertise to improve people, productivity and profits, and gives their clients broader access to the firm’s expertise. With Behavioural Science AI, we aim to amplify and share human expertise, not replace it.”