If you were going to design a major law firm from scratch in 2024, taking into account the current wave of genAI technology, how would you visualise it? One approach could be to see a law firm as an organic ‘legal machine’ overseen by human lawyers.
So, let’s see where this goes. What are the key parts of this legal machine? Here are some thoughts:
The Foundation Legal Data Layer
This is the core of all legal things:
Data: without any doubt we can say that a legal business must rely on data, from the most ground floor level, i.e. legislation, to more complex interpretations and case law, to work product such as contracts, to templates, playbooks and approved clauses. There is a wealth of data that needs to be drawn upon for a law firm to operate well, in fact to operate at all. While individual lawyers with vast photographic memories would be nice to have, the reality is you’ll need all of the above legal data and more. This one could say is the firm’s LLM, plus any other specialised databases that it’s able to tap. This data may be in one’s DMS, via external providers, or from other data sources.
The Wrapper
This is the application layer, which includes all of the workflows.
Workflows: a law firm makes ‘legal things’, or ‘legal outputs’ one could say: the review of a contract, a negotiation, the filings to a court. These are all shaped by workflows, in fact they are the end result of workflows. These patterns also tend to have a distinct and repeatable shape. But, they are neither the work itself, nor the data, nor the finished product. They are the pathways, the production lines, the root and branch systems, through which the product is assembled and delivered tapping into all the ‘feeder systems’ the firm has along the way.
Feedback loops: all good legal workflows have plenty of feedback inputs built in to remove errors, e.g. the leverage pyramid that corrects work product as it develops along the root and branch system. The feedback loop also adds new levels of expertise and complexity as it advances upwards through this same law firm pyramid.
(Now, you could perhaps place agents here, but they fit more neatly into a separate grouping, as they are not the workflow in themselves, but rather they drive data and feedback through these workflows, as well as take charge of legal actions, i.e. they are agentic.)
The Agentic Legal Cells
This is the ‘doing’, the self-driving, part of the system. These agents, these agentic legal cells, in the wider system, which are rewarded for ‘correct behaviour’ (in the human case with money and occasionally an award), drive everything forward. They act under their own steam, albeit they are activated by external signals.
Partner Cells: these are primarily activated by incoming signals from ‘clients’ – which are a separate type of legal machine that is symbiotic within things called ‘companies’. The partner cells are activated by the promise of substantial rewards, in this case ‘PEP’. Also, negative feedback avoidance – trying not to be de-equitized – also acts as a powerful signal that prompts action.
Leverage Cells: these are all the agentic legal cells that are not owners of the business and which must support the PEP accumulation of the partners. They are also rewarded with money to ensure compliance with signals sent onwards from the partners. Plus, they also have potential ‘punishment’ – ejection from the machine – as a motivator.
Control Program
And we cannot really run this legal machine without an overall control program. This program defines the parameters of the legal inputs accepted, and the quality and detail of the outputs required to meet those client demands. It also sets out which practice areas – and hence the workflows and data – it wants to handle. There will also be total entity KPIs, which go beyond PEP indicators, such as maintaining market position versus other entities operating in the same client ecosystem.
Overall, the control program’s raison d’être, rather like Richard Dawkins’ selfish gene, is to ensure that the entity keeps on going and reproduces regularly by bringing in consecutive waves of new junior agents, some of which will eventually mature to partner level and ensure the continuity of the overall organic legal machine.
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What Does This Mean?
OK, some of the above is a bit tongue in cheek, but the main point of this is quite serious, i.e. if we step back and think of a legal output-generating entity, AKA a law firm, and then consider it via the field of legal AI, then how would we build one today – if we could do such a thing?
Imagine a law firm that could operate at the highest levels of the market and generate extraordinary profits for the owners, yet was intentionally designed upon a data-based, defined workflow, and AI productivity foundation. I.e. rather than finding where things are, with the patterns, culture and manual processes that have evolved in an ad hoc way over decades, create a firm from scratch via the same approach as one would use if you were building an AI-driven ‘machine’. Hence, data, workflows, and agents.
It would clearly be a law firm where time was not the denominator of value. Nor would excessive manual leverage deployed to generate billable time be a core part of the business plan – although it may exist at the fringes of the strategy to handle esoteric, high-volume matters for which there is no pre-developed workflow that can be adapted to those needs.
And perhaps even this idea of building an ‘AI-Core Law Firm’ is fanciful as of right now, but again it helps us to think more clearly about what it is we have today. I.e. when we introduce a technology to a very human process, it in turn helps us to sublimate out the processes, data, and work patterns buried within, but are rarely objectively viewed – because in the past there was no need to ‘know thyself’, as the Ancient Greeks beseeched us to do.
I.e. the arrival of new technology produces a mirror and asks us to consider: ‘What is it that you actually do? How do you do it? Why do you do it this way?’
In conclusion, I’d argue that although the above is a thought experiment – and hopefully a useful one – there is indeed a serious aspect to this and that is: as genAI evolves and a truly systemic reappraisal of the modern law firm model comes about, what will this new law firm look like….?
(To be continued)
Richard Tromans, Founder, Artificial Lawyer – Dec 2024.
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