Pinsent Masons announced yesterday (23 February) that it has selected legal GenAI tool Legora across its corporate, commercial and property groups following a successful pilot programme.
This partnership will bring the firm’s total number of Legora users to 1,000, with plans to expand this further as use cases are proven. The implementation will be supported by an expanding cohort of AI Champions – lawyers from associate through to partner, who will be trained to upskill their colleagues.
Speaking with Legal IT Insider, head of the change & innovation board, Clare Francis, and director of transformation, Neil Green, said that the selection was the outcome of an extensive exercise of working out what challenges needed to be solved at the firm.
Pinsent Masons was an early Microsoft Copilot adopter, with Francis observing, “our adoption globally has been quite phenomenal in terms of the number of lawyers that are using it to a depth.” But the firm needed a lawyer-led AI tool, and started a review process in September last year, “working out how we would tackle this as a firm in the right kind of intentional way to make sure we made the right choice rather than the shiny choice.”
Green, who joined Pinsent Masons in 2024 from Barclays, in September undertook a deep dive session with each practise group, looking at their end-to-end lifecycle. That information was applied to the tools available in the market, with Legora coming out on top in terms of answering many user needs. The firm then kicked off a pilot with Legora in November across the corporate, commercial and property teams.
Focused training sessions and deep dives led to use cases that were fed back to the pilot group. Green says: “We did what I call our ‘white glove’ session. We went on a tour around a number of the UK offices, as well as dialled in our Australia colleagues, as we wanted to test the depth of that global capability within this initial first pilot.” Green and his team monitored how everyone on the pilot found the tool and how they could refine it.
“What came out is that the processes and how we operate are significantly improved,” he says. “It’s like with anything, over time, inefficiencies creep into processes, different technologies can create grit in the system. So these types of tools have really been able to navigate us away from that.”
There are a couple of interesting takeaways from Pinsent Masons’ selection exercise. The first is that they entered a pilot just with Legora – many firms have done side-by-side pilots with the likes of Harvey. At pilot stage a decision still had not been made, Green said, but multiple pilots are time consuming and the initial work done behind the scenes pointed to this tool.
The other is the amount of emphasis that has been placed on people and personas in the drive for adoption. Green says: “What we’re able to do is monitor and work with people around how they went through the journey from being a sceptic to being what we would class as a super user.”
The firm has looked at the behaviour of associates and lawyers up to partner level, refining elements of their training in response to feedback, with Green observing: “If you think of a nine-box grid, you want everyone to be in the top right hand. We started seeing a surge of people going that way because of the fact that we were able to tailor our training. It was always my mantra that we needed to be conscious about how we deploy Legora but also more importantly, there needed to be a co-creation element – so lawyers working with lawyers. The joy of Legora as a partner is that a lot of the legal engineers are ex-lawyers.”
Pinsent Masons is currently working through the same exercise with its two other practice groups, with Green observing: “The whole point is understanding how much it can deal with in those areas and therefore is it the right thing to deploy it there as well. We’re using that conscious mindset.”
ROI is a major topic of any big selection and Pinsent Masons looked at it “through a number of different lenses”, Francis says. There’s the question of whether a tool saves you time but also whether you can respond faster or create a more comprehensive output. “We’ve looked at those different lenses and are doing a lot of work looking at what the value proposition is to our clients and how we work with clients to co-create a value that they can take forward into their transactions to make better business decisions, rather than just looking about whether the tool saves time,” she says.
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