Patrick Shortall speaks with Jeff Westcott, Akin’s London-based director of innovation and AI, about the rollout of ndMAX
Akin, the Am Law 100 global law firm based in Washington DC, has expanded its use of AI across the firm with the rollout of NetDocuments’ ndMAX; a suite of generative AI tools that includes natural-language search across the document management system.
ndMAX sits within the wider DMS software package, which the firm has used for nearly 20 years. Following a pilot involving 100 lawyers that began in January 2025, the rollout started in early February of this year.
“One of the learnings we had from previous [pilots], certainly the AI part, is that we needed way longer than we thought to evaluate and to get busy lawyers to participate,” Jeff Westcott, Akin’s London-based director of innovation and AI, told Legal IT Insider.
Perhaps more cautious than some of its peers, the firm decided on ndMAX over other solutions partly because it wanted AI tools to be used within the DMS, rather than for documents to be copied or moved into external tools.
“We see it in that sort of pyramid, where Microsoft Copilot is our general productivity layer, then NetDocs as the next stack up,” says Westcott. While Copilot and NetDocs are used across the firm, each practice area also has specialist AI tools for certain tasks.
The most useful feature to drive adoption in Westcott’s opinion, is semantic search, both for lawyers and for wider information governance. “It’s a constant battle to persuade people to put things in a more structured environment,” he says.
Being able to search across documents using natural language has created a “virtuous circle” at the firm, with lawyers are putting more documents to the system in order to search them using the AI tool, improving structured knowledge retrieval.
The project, which cost in the “high six figures” – a similar amount to the firm’s investment in Copilot – benefitted from a close partnership between the firm and NetDocuments throughout.
Having NetDocuments trainers who are ex lawyers was helpful for the firm. “I think that’s probably more common with some of these new [tools], they realised that can’t just throw this over the fence and let us handle training and adoption,” says Westcott.
The firm doesn’t have standardised metrics it uses to measure return on investment, relying instead on going “door-to-door” to collect anecdotal evidence of the varying use cases and wins across different practice areas.
Looking to the future, Westcott is most eager to see developments in the software around the automated tagging of documents, and for a better user experience when using the semantic search.
