By Reena SenGupta and Neville Hawcock, RSGI
If there are any doubters about AI’s impact on business, IBM’s recent chief data officer survey would soon put them right.
Published last month, and drawing on responses from 1,700 senior data and analytic leaders in 19 industries worldwide, the report makes clear that enabling AI to deliver value is a key priority.
Some 83 per cent of respondents think the potential benefits of deploying AI agents in their organisations outweigh the risks, 77 per cent are comfortable with their organisations relying on the outcomes of those agents, and 82 per cent are hiring for AI-related data roles that did not exist last year.
While law is not listed among the industries surveyed, the findings in The AI Multiplier Effect – as the study is titled – will strike a chord with many law firms and in-house legal teams.
Bucking years of being seen as laggards in tech adoption, many law firms and in-house legal teams have adopted generative AI with alacrity. Of 194 law firms worldwide that submitted entries to RSGI for the FT’s Innovative Lawyers programme this year, 113 – nearly 60 per cent — highlighted the development of digital or AI tools to serve clients or improve internal processes.
RSGI’s latest findings – from its research for Innovative Lawyers North America — confirm several of the trends identified in IBM’s report.
Here are three of the most salient.
First, there’s significant value in proprietary data. Describing it as the “secret sauce” that competitors lack, IBM reports that 78 per cent of CDOs see leveraging it as a key strategic goal. And it was Latham & Watkins’ skill at doing this that helped secure it the accolade of most innovative law firm in North America at yesterday’s FT awards event in New York.
Latham’s 8-K Trigger Analysis Tool, which establishes whether a given corporate event – such as a senior executive appointment – requires a company to file a report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, draws on both client and the firm’s proprietary data and has, the firm says, enabled relationship partners to respond to clients faster, freeing time for more strategic work. The brainchild of Keith Halverstam, head of Latham’s public company and board representation practice, the tool contributed to his shortlisting for the FT’s “Intrapreneur” award.
Significantly, the category winner, Karen Buzard, US head of A&O Shearman’s Markets Innovation Group, was likewise recognised for work on AI tools that leverage proprietary data. These include the firm’s pioneering ContractMatrix drafting software and, more recently, a “loan module” for analysing loan documentation, both developed in association with legal AI start-up Harvey.
Second, good data strategy helps AI deliver key business outcomes — or, as IBM puts it, “Don’t just collect data. Deploy it on a mission”. The IBM report notes that CDOs from organisations achieving the highest ROI on data and AI investments are 25 per cent more likely to say that they can explain how their data contributes to corporate goals.
A prime legal example is Morgan Lewis, which has developed a new tool that allows it to focus more on case strategy in litigation and investigations. Called Custodian Connect, it rationalises the way lawyers gather information from custodian interviews. This was previously collected and stored in multiple formats, complicating and slowing analysis. By supporting real-time data entry during interviews and aggregating the information on a centralised platform, the platform – which won the FTIL “digital tools” category – has yielded time and cost savings while giving clients a clearer view of the discovery process.
Third, organisations need to democratise their data – to give more staff access to it, and to empower them to use it. According to IBM, CDOs from organisations achieving the highest ROI on data and AI investments are more likely to see risks in limiting rather than broadening data access among staff. “Make every role a data role,” it urges.
In the legal sector, Orrick shows the way, devising a programme to pair legal secretaries or executive assistants with so-called “practice analysts”, tech-literate employees who specialise in data management, AI literacy and other digital skills.
Masterminded by Chloe Moedritzer, recruited to Orrick’s innovation team from legal ops at Microsoft, the scheme has delivered improvements in areas ranging from billing to regulatory research. By enabling legal secretaries and other staff to leverage firm data more effectively, it earned Orrick an FTIL award in the “people strategy” category.
When generative AI first made headlines, it seemed to many in the law to offer a way of side-stepping the hard work of creating sound data and knowledge architecture. Three years on, this is clearly not the case. Savvy law firms are collecting and organising their proprietary data so that it becomes knowledge that can be used to benefit both clients and their own people. Information architecture has never been as important, because better IA means smarter AI.
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