A&O Shearman commits $1.1B to AI strategy
A&O Shearman has committed $1.1 billion over five years to the next phase of its artificial intelligence (AI) strategy. Most of the investment will come from each practice devoting at least 3% of its time to developing specialist AI tools and services within its area of law.
The firm says the plan changes how legal work is designed and delivered to clients, and how it trains its people. It builds on the firm’s 2022 rollout of generative AI across the organization and is supported by a governance structure covering security and quality, stats the law firm.
After four years of testing different deployment approaches, the firm concluded that “AI has the greatest impact when practice and sector expertise is embedded in systems that can then be systemized across a particular area of law”. In the firm’s view, this approach delivers better outcomes for clients than a single set of generic tools applied uniformly across the firm.
“This significant investment signals where we intend to take the firm over the next decade”, said Hervé Ekué, global managing partner at A&O Shearman. “AI lets us bring an enhanced skillset to our clients’ work, however complex, on a global scale and in a way that wasn’t possible before. It opens new ways to deliver value and sharpens how we compete.”
Client delivery and ContractMatrix
The firm is building new AI services in collaboration with clients. It has secured a range of engagements in which a team of lawyers, data scientists and developers delivers ContractMatrix across multiple jurisdictions, often under novel pricing structures. Client uptake across the ContractMatrix product suite has increased ninefold over the last 12 months.
A&O Shearman will measure success by faster access to its judgment and expertise, less friction in legal and commercial processes, and greater cost efficiency. Clients are also receiving actionable legal data and insights for commercial decisions, alongside services the firm did not previously offer.
ContractMatrix is an AI-powered contract tool for in-house counsel, which the firm built in 2023 in collaboration with Microsoft and Harvey. The firm has since launched ContractMatrix Vantage and, with Harvey, a series of agentic AI tools built in collaborative spaces. These are available to corporates, financial institutions and other law firms.
In one engagement, a global financial and investment conglomerate tested ContractMatrix against an internal data science team, specialist legal AI systems and foundation model providers. In the client’s own blind evaluations, ContractMatrix scored 8.5% higher than the next closest rival, which led to a multi-year mandate to deliver specialized AI legal services.
“AI changes what we can build for clients and how quickly we can do it”, said David Wakeling, global head of AI at A&O Shearman. “We design each solution with the client, embed it with detailed and specialist proprietary knowledge from our lawyers, adapt it for the client’s risk positions and let the results do the talking. Our approach is open and transparent with clients, inviting them into our tech ecosystem to see the value we are bringing. We want to have more upfront client conversations about how the work, the relationship and the economics can evolve with AI.”
Internal adoption
According to the firm, 96% of its partners and 93% of its lawyers use its AI tools. Together they have carried out more than 558,000 activities on the ContractMatrix and Harvey legal workflow tools. The firm says four years of building governance frameworks, testing use cases, training lawyers and structuring its own knowledge and data have made AI part of how it works in every market.
A&O Shearman also works with regulators, professional bodies and policymakers on how AI should be used in legal services and across client sectors, states the law firm, which has taken part in UK, U.S. and EU efforts to promote economic growth through responsible AI deployment. It has also taken part in experimentation through measures such as regulatory sandboxes, including the UK’s advisory AI Growth Lab for legal services.
