We speak with Isabel Parker, chief innovation officer at White & Case, about the launch of AI assistant Atlas and the firm’s multi-layered AI roadmap that includes foundational work on its knowledge and data, plus a firm-wide change management programme to drive innovation and adoption.
White & Case has launched Atlas, a conversational AI assistant that is the first application built on its proprietary AI platform, in the culmination of a year of growth and development led by chief innovation officer Isabel Parker.
Parker describes Atlas as a ChatGPT-style application that can use a selection of models and has “all the things you would expect” such as web search, chat history and a prompt library, plus document upload feature in different formats.
Lawyers can create custom prompts and share them, and Parker says: “If you have practice-specific prompts that work really well for your M&A lawyers in APAC, those can be shared and reused, which drives a level of global consistency.” She adds: “The other thing Atlas has that’s very useful is preferences. So you can set your preferences and create your own system prompt that enables it to return results that are tailored to you, and that’s very effective.”
In terms of anticipated use cases, Parker says: “We’re keen to see how people use it. I expect it to very rapidly build fluency and capability. We know what we don’t want people to use it for: it’s not an eDiscovery tool. It’s not like we can put a million documents in here; that’s not what it’s designed to do. So, we have a limit on document upload, for example, deliberately.”
She adds: “Because it’s so intuitive and easy to use, it will be a really good way of encouraging people to experiment and learn. It looks very White & Case. It’s all in our house style. If you download a response, it all comes in the White & Case house style. It will allow people to work out what they can do with GenAI and client data. It will help people get to grips with what works and what doesn’t.”
The first roll out of Atlas was in the middle of October and Parker and her team are continuing to build and improve Atlas’s features “to keep the energy and engagement.” Development will be iterative and there is strong feedback that lawyers want to use Atlas to explore curated data sets or knowledge stores, so the team will be building out that capability in the next release, which is likely to be December or early January.
“We’ll be bringing in that deep research capability,” Parker says. “It has to be curated data sets, we can’t set it loose across the entirety of iManage obviously because it would have the same challenges as a Copilot. You can’t be confident that you wouldn’t be surfacing things you ought not. Client confidentiality is absolutely paramount for us, so we will give Atlas the ability to search data sets like our precedent databases, or our knowledge bank. That is a curated segregated data set that is safe to allow us to search.”
Atlas was developed in partnership with Deloitte, which is where Parker joined White & Case from in October last year. It looks likely that the assistant will not be the only application built by White & Case and Parker says: “We may build other applications on the platform to meet needs that aren’t met by third party tools on the market.”
The AI Platform
In terms of strategy, White & Case is combining a buy and build approach to AI. Parker said: “There are some very sophisticated third-party tools on the market, but they are built with a degree of genericism because they’re built for a lot of different law firms. This is great in some ways as we can benefit from that learning and we don’t want to reinvent the wheel and build everything ourselves. But also, there may be ways of working that are particular to the way we deliver work as White & Case that we want to encode on our own platform now. The platform gives us the ability to do that if we choose to.”
It is clear that to Parker, the real story is the underlying platform and the fact that White & Case now has the capability to build applications itself for greater differentiation.
“Building the platform has been a forcing mechanism to think about many of the issues that we’re going to have to grapple with in the future. So having the right skills in our technology teams, having the right skills in our innovation teams, knowing the right questions to ask about data security, privacy, and about which kind of models to leverage and their performance. It’s forced us to grapple with some very tricky challenges which even if we never build another application, makes us very, very smart buyers of third-party technology. And that’s very important to me – that we have this internal skill, as that’s the future of the firm. I’m not outsourcing that. It’s a risk.”
White & Case’s AI platform is built in its Azure environment, leveraging Azure AI Foundry, with which you can design, customize, and manage AI applications and agents.
“It’s got a choice of models including the most advanced, GPT-5. So it benefits from all the inherited guardrails and protections you get from Azure AI Foundry and we also have our own guardrails and protection that we built in to make sure people are using it responsibly, safely and ethically,” Parker says.
Buy v Build
From a buy perspective, Parker says that White & Case is evaluating best-in-class tools on the market.
They already have Copilot in pilot, but it’s not fully rolled out. “There are some challenging data governance issues around rolling out Copilot at scale to a law firm of our size and complexity,” says Parker. They also already use vLex Vincent (now part of Clio), a research-based tool that Parker says “has some pretty sophisticated GenAI capabilities over the top and our litigators find that very, very helpful and useful.”
Parker and her team, which includes Alistair Wye, who joined from Latham & Watkins, and Jack Shepherd, previously at iManage, are evaluating two other GenAI platforms and expect to make a decision on those before the end of the year.
However, she comes back to the differentiation point time and again, observing that external tools will be combined with an investment in White & Case’s own capability and AI platform on which it can built to meet client and practice needs not met by market tools. “I do think that gives us the opportunity for more differentiation because if we’re just buying a one of the two platforms which I’ve mentioned, you’re only getting what everybody else has got. And while it’s important to stay current with your competitors and current with your clients, many of whom are also investing in similar platforms, buying the same platform will never allow you to differentiate, not really. So we have to have that ability to build ourselves.”
Adoption and change management
The next big story in the AI roadmap will be around adoption and Parker says: “I really do feel that law firms don’t focus enough on change management, and it’s to their detriment.
“We have have invested in change management capability with individuals who really understand the law firm market, there’s not many of them, but I think I’ve found the best,” she says. “We have some change management capability dedicated to this work and we have created an Innovation Champions Network.”
The Network is organised by region and practice area, for example ‘America’s M&A’ or ‘EMEA capital markets.’ And each regional section has a nominated lead innovation partner and lead innovation associate or associates, underpinned by a self-selecting set of champions who can be drawn from anywhere in the firm.
“The Network are all communicating on Teams,” Parker says. “People seem very, very energised and interested so I’m hopeful if we can give the Network the right attention and support from a central perspective that that’s going to make a big difference to how this lands.”
A cultural shift
White & Case is far from new to AI and has been recognised for its work in this area by the FT Innovative Lawyers for North America, including this year as the the third most innovative law firm of the last 20 years. Before Parker joined, the firm already had an active innovation committee led by a cross-practice group of partners together with Michael Hertz, former chief marketing officer-turned senior advisor.
However, the change management piece goes to one of the big changes that Parker hopes to to drive, which is a shift towards lawyers owning innovation for their own practices and clients.
“The one thing that’s a big take away, and I know you’ll hear this from other places, but this is really true to me, is getting the lawyers to be less consumers of innovation and more creators of it,” she says. “For a long time. Innovation teams have been serving stuff up to lawyers but now, for lawyers, innovation is the job. They’ve got to be creators of innovation and active leaders and users, not just consumers of it. And so shifting that narrative is a really important part of this.”
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