Rench:
A community to help lawyers build their careers around artificial intelligence has grown from a few people in a WhatsApp group a year ago to over 2,000 lawyers today.
RepresentAI was founded by technology executive Sarah Rench and built three industry hubs, for finance, media and law to help people learn how to use and create new AI apps, agents and skills.
The legal hub has grown the fastest.
Ms Rench, who studied AI at MIT and is global AI security lead at IT consultancy Avanade, told Legal Futures: “RepresentAI exists to make sure people don’t just hear about the future of AI in law – they are part of building it.”
The AI innovation takes place online and at live events, where solicitors, barristers and other legal professionals work on solo projects or collaboratively in teams.
The community provides online courses, AI toolkits, Claude Skills, Gemini Gems and Custom GPTs, and 11 legal datasets which are used to test new innovations. No coding skills are required.
Ms Rench said: “We use proven frameworks and workflows that were designed for real legal tasks and outputs, and we share insights that have practical legal applications. At our live events lawyers share approaches and solve problems collectively. It’s amazing to see.”
RepresentAI is free to join, and lawyers take part in a private capacity. People have joined from law firms like A&O Shearman, Linklaters and DLA Piper, chambers including Fountain Court, and in-house teams at Barclays, Selfridges and Bank of America.
One of the first innovations to gain attention was the Opposing Counsel Review, an AI adversary that helps lawyers dismantle and find weaknesses in their legal arguments, so they can prepare stronger cases.
As we reported last month [1], Opposition Counsel was developed by Larissa Meredith-Flister, a litigation lawyer at Charles Lyndon in London.
Ms Meredith-Flister, who describes RepresentAI as “phenomenal”, has now unveiled Source-Locked Verification, a new AI skill that forces Claude to use just two sources: the lawyer’s evidence and information from verified sources.
If Claude cannot generate a response from these two sources, the AI makes Claude admit that – rather than produce a plausible answer from multiple, unverified sources.
Ms Meredith-Flister said: “Most lawyers using AI do not have a defensible method of verifying what it produces. Everything starts with proper verification.”
Another creation is the Climate Litigation Risk Radar, which enables law firms to check clients’ litigation risks.
When lawyers select an industry, a potentially harmful activity and a jurisdiction, the AI generates a visual assessment of any risk, along with notes on exposure and key questions that the lawyers and their client should consider.
The lawyer behind it is Lylian Portes Meira, a former associate lawyer at Pogust Goodhead in London who now leads a climate organisation called Justice For Our Future.
She said: “The AI does not predict litigation outcomes, but it shows how exposure to climate litigation may arise through greenwashing claims, disclosure obligations, governance issues and supply-chain liability. It is not legal advice, but it is meant to open up the conversation.”
RepresentAI said all the innovations “stand up to scrutiny from clients, regulators and peers.”
The community recently staged a crisis simulation in which an AI C-suite from a listed company – including an AI general counsel – had to respond to a series of escalating AI issues, whilst meeting their obligations under the EU AI Act.
The Act prohibits companies from using high-risk AI systems and can lead to fines of 3% of annual turnover for any breaches.
Ms Rench said: “The AI GC identified the legal risks but missed the organisational dilemmas. Because the AI can’t read the realities – the people, the existing processes and cultural nuances – it provided solutions that were legally right but operationally difficult to implement.
“And because AI can’t really understand the nuances around time and energy, it made everything sound like it could happen tomorrow. It doesn’t yet account for what it actually takes to move a team forward in the real world.”
After 12 successful live events in London, there are now plans to branch out nationally, starting in Birmingham, and internationally in Spain, the US and Dubai.
Ms Rench said: “It’s been incredible to see RepresentAI grow so fast, and to witness members evolve from learning about AI to building AI systems. It’s growing so quickly now I’m having to use AI to keep up with it.”