Barnes & Thornburg has picked 38 of its lawyers to help colleagues use artificial intelligence technology more effectively across the firm.
The top 100 US law firm uses AI extensively. Nearly 90% of the firm’s attorneys are actively using AI tools, including from legal AI start-up Harvey and Thomson Reuters.
The lawyers − picked because they were enthusiastic AI users − give video talks on AI within their legal practices.
The creation of a group of staff outside the tech department to advise lawyers on how to get full value from AI is a sign of the technology’s increasing importance to law firms’ daily operations and strategy.
Kaitlyn Stone, litigation partner and co-chair of Thornburg’s AI practice, told GLP that the goals of the AI advocates are not only to ensure attorneys are AI enabled and have access to top tier technologies, but that they also understand how to use AI in a way that helps their clients.
The AI advocates work in nine legal practices at the firm, including corporate (M&A, private equity and venture capital), litigation, restructuring and bankruptcy, intellectual property, and labour and employment.
“What we’re finding is each individual practice group, each individual department has their own unique needs for [AI] tools,” said Brian McGinnis, chief privacy officer and co-chair of the Thornburg’s AI practice.
He mainly uses Harvey’s AI software.
“A lot of what I’m doing doesn’t have any case law surrounding it at this point,” he said. “So, a tool that’s designed to read and decipher cases for me isn’t as valuable as something that’s really good at drafting a privacy agreement, for example.”
The success of the AI advocate programme will be assessed by the firm’s legal operations team, in part based on more than 30 AI projects.
“There’s still a lot of nuance to this and so there needs to be conversations with the teams that are actually on the ground using the [AI] technology with the clients to see what they think about the outcomes,” said Stone.
As law firms increase AI spending, they are trying various methods to maximise payback, including appointing a head of AI, recruited from the tech industry; creating AI teams; co-developing AI with suppliers; and selecting lawyers to advise on AI use.
Winston Taylor – formed in June by the merger of Winston & Strawn and Taylor Wessing – also uses AI “ambassadors” in different parts of the firm to provide feedback on what AI is successful and what need more work, according to Non-Billable.
Kent Zimmermann, who advises law firms on strategy and M&A, said Thornburg’s approach to championing AI was a “smart, common-sense approach” that an increasing number of other law firms are following.
Firms are “formally or informally tapping” partners in practice groups that can benefit from using AI to take the lead in their practice”, he said.
This is happening in part because the effective use of AI in a law firm generally varies considerably from practice to practice and sometimes within a practice, he said.
Weston Wicks, a legaltech expert at research company Gartner, said Thornburg’s AI advocates “will help move the needle on user adoption and grow the number of AI use cases that can provide value to the client or save time for the lawyers and paralegals”.
The idea of legaltech champions isn’t new, though, he added.
“It’s a common part of larger change management programmes,” he said. “I’m advising many corporate legal departments to survey and identify practice group leaders and change champions in advance of rolling out any new legal AI solutions.”
Such tech champions need to be invested in the rollout of software, provide advice to smaller groups of legal staff and frequently show the team how the software can add value or save people time over the course of a new implementation, he said.
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