Linklaters yesterday (23 September) announced the firmwide roll out of Swedish-founded generative AI platform Legora, marking the start of a strategic partnership that will see the pair meet with clients jointly to discuss their technology needs.
Linklaters is embedding Legora across all 30 of its offices following a competitive process begun at the start of this year, involving trials across five of its practice groups.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, structured finance partner Tom Quoroll – who is chair of Linklaters’ generative AI programme – and director of AI delivery, Sarah Barnard, said that the selection process involved looking not just at the technology, but whether there was a good relationship with the Legora team, with Barnard commenting: “One of the things that in our investigations was very clear is that many of our competitors have bought licenses but not managed to get over the curve of actually embedding the tool into their BAU work in a systematised, substantive way. That was something that we were keen to be able to evidence before we actually bought Legora. We worked with the different teams quite closely, with the Legora team and also competitors, to make sure that we had the right relationship, and we felt that our working practices and styles aligned well.”
Use of the word ‘embed’ is repeated in our conversation and it is interesting to note (and a testament to Legora’s fast growth) that over the next four-to-five weeks, there will be in-person training on and by Legora in almost all of Linklaters offices. Quoroll, who went to Stockholm and met the Legora team, said: “Having office hours was also an attractive part of the proposition, because we’ve got people that we trust and think are quality people who are available and hands-on providing, to be honest, the scale that we would struggle with in terms of reaching the whole network, with real knowledge and experience of the tool, in a short space of time.”
In terms of the tech, Barnard says Linklaters ran a scientific process that involved quantitative data collection and qualitative discussions with regard to people’s experiences across regions and practice areas. The firm already has its own GenAI chatbot Laila, but feedback included that Legora is able to handle larger documents and larger document sets, as well as praise for Legora’s tabular review feature used in the likes of due diligence, which enables users to extract key data points from documents and put them in a grid. The firm is keeping Laila’s future development under review.
There are two further things to note about this selection. The first is that there is a heavy emphasis on training partners – not just associates – to use Legora. At the partners conference last week, Legora featured highly. Barnard said: “At the partners conference we ran workshops where we actually took partners through using Legora, working through use cases and showing them how you use it, saying: “Get excited. This is not something that you delegate to your associates. You can do it yourself.’ It’s really intentional so that you get that tone from the top and also show that this is not rocket science.”
Linklaters partners are being asked to have strategic conversations and come back to the Legora project team with information on what further support they need.
Echoing the experience of others when it comes to using GenAI technology more generally, Quoroll says that partners have found unusual and unexpected use cases, observing: “Partners are looking at Legora and saying, ‘Well actually I can do my own job better with this tool, and deliver a better service to clients.’ So that’s what I’m most excited about.”
The next steps internally will be to look at how to leverage Linklaters’ own expertise and data in combination with Legora, which is where firms using any of the leading GenAI tools can begin to achieve real competitive edge.
The second thing to note about this selection – which is very much last but not least – is that Linklaters is exploring the work that it can do with Legora in helping its own clients. Quoroll said: “Part of the deal that we have done with Legora is that we will go and work with clients together. So, we will be going to client meetings together to talk about how we can combine the technology with the expertise and deliver something that is different for clients.”
This is under discussion with more to be revealed in due course, but it emphasises that this is very much a strategic partnership: a clever strategy on Legora’s part, and just what law firms are looking for from their vendors right now.
See also:
Deloitte + Legora interview: Why they say 1 + 1 = the next wave of transformation