Kirkland & Ellis is set to spend $500m building its own AI platform, according to a Financial Times report.
The investment would go toward developing proprietary technology rather than relying solely on tools available to competitors, with the firm expecting to spend around $100m this year and "hundreds of millions more" over the next four years, chair Jon Ballis told the FT.
He added that Kirkland intended to "take the collective intelligence of our institution and be able to deploy that throughout our firm."
The AI platform is being developed using information from 250 Kirkland lawyers, with outside companies working alongside the firm's own engineers and data scientists. Those outside companies would not be able to sell the technology to others, with Kirkland owning, or having the right to own, all of it.
Law firms have been racing to develop their use of AI, with many announcing deals with legal tech companies Harvey and Legora over the past few years and others, among them Clifford Chance and White & Case, building their own AI platforms in-house.
A&O Shearman has co-developed tools with Microsoft and Harvey, while last month, Freshfields announced a partnership with Anthropic that will see it work with the tech giant to build specialist AI tools that could later be licensed to other law firms through subscription-style models.
However, the risks of the technology were underscored last week when Pinsent Masons was reprimanded by a London court for making false submissions based on AI. Last month, Sullivan & Cromwell told a US federal bankruptcy court that a filing it had made in a case contained multiple AI hallucinations.
Kirkland will fund its AI investment from its own revenue, which last year reached a record $10.6bn in 2025, the most of any law firm globally, as profit per equity partner grew to $11.1bn.
That scale enables it to make an investment in developing its own technology that smaller rivals could struggle to match, underscoring how the AI race could become another factor enabling the global elite to pull further ahead.
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