Our guest in this episode is David Wakeling, a partner at A&O Shearman, which became the world’s third largest law firm in May, thanks to the merger of Allen and Overy, a UK “magic circle” firm, with Shearman & Sterling of New York.

David heads up a team within the firm called the Markets Innovation Group (MIG), which consists of lawyers, developers and technologists, and is seeking to disrupt the legal industry. He also leads the firm's AI Advisory practice, through which the firm is currently advising 80 of the largest global businesses on the safe deployment of AI.

One of the initiatives David has led is the development and launch of ContractMatrix, in partnership with Microsoft and Harvey, an OpenAI-backed, GPT-4-based large language model that has been fine-tuned for the legal industry. ContractMatrix is a contract drafting and negotiation tool powered by generative AI. It was tested and honed by 1,000 of the firm’s lawyers prior to launch, to mitigate against risks like hallucinations. The firm estimates that the tool is saving up to seven hours from the average contract review, which is around a 30% efficiency gain. As well as internal use by 2,000 of its lawyers, it is also licensed to clients.

This is the third time we have looked at the legal industry on the podcast. While lawyers no longer use quill pens, they are not exactly famous for their information technology skills, either. But  the legal profession has a couple of characteristics which make it eminently suited to the deployment of advanced AI systems: it generates vast amounts of data and money, and lawyers frequently engage in text-based routine tasks which can be automated by generative AI systems.

Previous London Futurists Podcast episodes on the legal industry:

• Ep 53: The Legal Singularity, with Benjamin Alarie
• Ep 47: AI transforming professional services, with Shamus Rae

Other selected follow-ups:

• David Wakeling
• A&O Shearman
• ContractMatrix
• Harvey AI
• RAG - Retrieval-Augmented Generation
• Digital Operational Resilience Act (impacts banking)
• The Productivity J-Curve (PDF), by Erik Brynjolfsson, Daniel Rock, Chad Syverson
• Agentic AI: The Next Big Breakthrough That's Transforming Business And Technology, by Bernard Marr

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration