LegalTech
Our focus has always been on solving real-world client problems, rather than adopting technology indiscriminately, and with no clear strategy.
It’s important that we stick to this guiding principle and responsibly deploy solutions that are of real value to our clients, particularly given how rapidly AI and technology are developing. Our strategy concentrates on balancing the potential cost and efficiency benefits of AI and other technologies, against the challenges that come with any new tech, such as ensuring accuracy, and having the appropriate compliance measures such as data security and privacy in place.
By focusing on these core principles, clients will benefit from legal technology that drives genuine benefits and value to your legal function, as opposed to technology ‘for the sake of it’.
The current focus of our strategy is making sure we have the right people, processes, and infrastructure in place, in order to get the best outcomes for our clients, and to ensure we can be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to identifying new technology.
- People: Our dynamic team, led by Helder Santos, Head of LegalTech & Innovation (who brings extensive expertise in digital transformation) and Jennifer McBride, Legal Director – LegalTech Practice (a commercial contracts / tech lawyer who previously practised for 10+ years within our Commercial team).
Helder drives LegalTech innovation by shaping and delivering a clear, future-focused vision that leverages emerging technologies to enhance efficiency, elevate client service, and align with firm-wide strategy. Jennifer uses her legal experience to work with our own lawyers to help AI become part of their day to day toolkit, and works with our clients to discuss tools and solutions that might help address their specific pain points and legal use cases.
Our team of innovative LegalTech specialists, solution architects and lawyers tackle client challenges head-on, recommending and developing the most effective tools to suit the individual business, as well as trialling, testing, and onboarding new tools internally to help keep Bird & Bird at the forefront of this tech revolution.
- Processes: We have a number of processes relating to measuring the effectiveness and quality of new technologies, such as risk assessments, market analysis, and continuous improvement. These are detailed in the next section of this response.
- Infrastructure: We use small-scale pilot projects both internally and with clients, taking real-life problems to test the use of AI and new technologies. These pilots allow us to quantify the benefits of new tech, and act as the infrastructure on which we can scale up our solutions.
For example, we recently ran a global Generative AI Hackathon to explore use cases for technology, and set up a secure Bird & Bird account for GPT3.5, acting as a ‘playground’ for our teams to explore the latest Open AI technology, with no risk of data being sent back to Microsoft or Open AI.
- Training: We are dedicated to empowering our people to maximise these AI solutions. Collaborating with education partners, we deliver customised training programs on leveraging AI responsibly and effectively in our legal practice.
Key principles and processes which provide the foundation to our strategy include:
- Assessing and minimising risks: We have developed a firmwide policy for effective and safe use of generative AI to provide all our staff with sensible guardrails. This enables us to balance innovation against risk mitigation, taking an approach that is pro innovation.
- Internal gap analysis: Analysis of our current AI tools and broader ways of working to identify areas of our work which would benefit from the use of AI tools.
- Market analysis: Continuously exploring the range of AI tools available, and investigating further functionality within our existing tools, to maximise our AI offering.
- Innovation Pathway (‘Bloom’): Bloom provides a global framework for implementing innovative ideas across the firm. Anyone can submit an idea via the pathway, which is then reviewed against key criteria including benefit to clients and scale, and implemented within the firm.
- Feedback and continuous improvement: We take into account feedback from our teams and clients, to ensure AI tools remain fit-for-purpose and drive the best possible benefits, with a clear focus on increasing efficiency and accuracy, and reducing costs.
We are already utilising a number of more tried and tested AI / Generative AI solutions (detailed below) on a routine basis as part of our standard legal practice. These AI solutions have a demonstrable track record of producing high quality results in a cost effective manner. We have also been trialling more advanced AI solutions, on a case-by-case pilot basis in order to find out more about these products and how they can bring benefits to our clients.
We continuously monitor the marketplace for technology developments (AI and non-AI) that can provide benefits for our clients. When we identify a suitable AI product or service, our focus is on balancing the cost and efficiency benefits to the client, against key challenges such as accuracy and security.
Through these processes, not only are we supporting our clients in responding to the challenges and opportunities posed by AI, but we are actively using AI tools to drive efficiency and cost savings for our clients.
The AI applications that we have implemented into our routine legal practice when working with clients include:
- Legora: Our innovative Generative AI legal assistant, developed in collaboration with the team at Legora, assists our lawyers with research, drafting, and knowledge management, enhancing efficiency and fostering innovation within our firm.
- Copilot: We enabled Microsoft Copilot Chat on Edge, an AI-powered system built on OpenAI’s ChatGPT, to the entire organisation. We also deployed Copilot 365 that can assist with key tasks such as summarising documents, streamlining communications, generating drafts, and searching for key data inside Microsoft Word. This saves our teams significant time so they can focus on delivering meaningful, strategic legal advice.
- ChatGPT Playground: We've launched an internal, private, and secure Bird & Bird “playground' for our teams to explore the latest OpenAI technology, without risk of data exposure. This allows us to build bespoke solutions to specific problems our clients are facing, which can then be used directly by our clients, as well as internally.
- Synthesia: This is a cutting-edge Generative AI tool that creates high-quality videos using AI-generated avatars. It converts text into speech with virtual actors, offering an innovative way to produce professional video content without real actors or extensive resources, on an international basis. At our firm, we've been leveraging Synthesia to enhance communication and training with our clients.
- DeepL: We utilise DeepL, the world’s most accurate translator, to translate text and documents for cross-border matters efficiently. DeepL's neural machine translation saves significant time and costs compared to traditional methods, enabling seamless collaboration and a 'one firm’ approach for our clients.
- Luminance: Our Corporate due diligence processes use market-leading AI platform, Luminance, which leverages machine learning algorithms to accelerate and enhance legal contract review. The platform also facilitates easy real-time, cross-border collaboration via its intuitive workflow tools.
- Relativity: This is a state of the art and widely used electronic document processing, analytics and review tool from kCura. It helps reviewers to work efficiently and to focus their activity on the most relevant documents, providing immediate insight into electronic document collections.
As part of the tool, Relativity Review Manager generates forecasts and tracks the progress and time cost of human review with graphical reports. Relativity can be used for litigation, arbitration, early case evaluation and regulatory investigations. It integrates with our fact and issue analysis tool, CaseMap.
Whenever we develop or implement any new legal tech, the value that it adds to our clients, in terms of time and cost savings, is a core consideration. We use small-scale pilot projects to quantify the benefits of new technology, so that when we scale up, we have a clear idea of what savings and efficiencies will be realised. As well as focusing on the hard benefits of cost and time savings, we also focus on the softer benefits of technology, such as better collaboration and client benefits.
With AI being so new to legal process improvements, and with the technology evolving so rapidly, we are mindful that at this early stage, it is difficult to quantify tangible savings to our clients. Rather than give unproven, isolated benefits, we prefer to focus on the value of technology as a whole, in the context of our wider approach to service delivery (e.g. project management, client relationship management, etc.).
Legora
Bird & Bird has collaborated with Legora to develop our Generative AI legal assistant to streamline and enhance legal workflows.
