Tart-Roberts: Most of firm’s lawyers regularly use GenAI
A City law firm is putting a focus on “helping clients understand the potential” of artificial intelligence (AI), with a new tool which acts as a “custom-built AI layer” for them.
Chris Tart-Roberts, head of lawtech and chief knowledge and innovation officer at Macfarlanes, said clients reported that AI was a “big priority” for them to incorporate into their business, but many did not know where to start.
The law firm’s new tool, Amplify – designed to act as a “custom-built AI layer” on top of clients’ documents and data – was “a way for clients to introduce AI into a complicated landscape”.
It allows for the bespoke application of generative AI to companies’ own tasks and workflows – including summaries, data extraction and analysis – with functionality that allows for chat-style natural language-based querying across document and data sets.
Macfarlanes has been one of the early AI adopters and Mr Tart-Roberts said Amplify had been tested “with a significant number of clients” before its launch last month.
There was “really significant appetite” for it, although he did not say how many clients had signed up to the subscription-based service so far.
Among the companies that tested it were “three of our longest-standing clients”, and it had been used across sectors like financial services, private equity and family offices.
Mr Tart-Roberts said Macfarlanes was one of the first law firms to roll out Harvey, a GenAI platform backed among others by OpenAI, in 2023.
Harvey provides the underlying technology for Amplify, which is then built to the client’s needs by the Macfarlanes lawtech team.
More than 80% of the firm’s lawyers now “regularly” used GenAI and a “significant number” were using it “day in and day out”.
The technology had “bifurcated into two use categories”, he explained: to help with drafting, where it was used every day to save time, and document review and due diligence. Here it could be used “much more radically to change the way people work”.
Mr Tart-Roberts gave the example of an arbitration where there were 10,000 or so documents which needed to be reviewed “really quickly”. The exercise was carried out with the support of GenAI, which saved “weeks of time”.
The firm’s focus was now to “bring GenAI to bear on bigger and more meatier tasks” and take it out to clients.
“Our approach has not changed, and our strategy on AI remains the same. What has changed is its adoption across the firm, and the work we do with clients, which has increased significantly.”
Meanwhile, the AI agent built in-house by venture capital-backed law firm Avantia Law has gone live.
Called Ava and drawing on more than a million legal documents, the firm said it integrates with MS Office and “automates workflows, addressing administrative tasks, and predicting next steps”.
Founder James Sutton told Legal Futures recently that the advantage of an AI agent was that it could do “more than just legal work” such as creating a contract, reviewing a document or searching precedents.
The agent could deal with “workflow tasks” like creating new files, drafting emails or preparing a ‘to do’ list for a lawyer.
Every output is reviewed and validated by senior lawyers.
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