Kirkland & Ellis has earmarked $500m for the development of its own proprietary AI platform, as the firm looks to gain a competitive edge amid fierce competition in legal tech.
The firm expects to spend more than $100m this year and hundreds of millions more over the next three to four years, on top of its continued spending on third-party AI licences.
Kirkland is also consulting 250 of its lawyers, including 100 partners, about their working practices to help inform the platform’s development. While the firm is employing outside companies, set to be announced in the coming weeks, to develop the platform, it will retain ownership of the platform, and the companies will not be allowed to sell to competitors.
The firm will fund the investment itself, with the $500m figure accounting for around 5% of the $10.6bn in turnover the firm made last year.
A job advertisement for a senior AI role at Kirkland published today (28 May) states that the position involves ‘designing, managing, and optimising the firm’s AI infrastructure, spanning on-premise GPU environments and Microsoft Azure-based AI platforms.’ The advert also references Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry, Azure AI Search and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
At least one partner at the firm has experience on the inside of legal tech, with structured finance partner Suri Patel joining in London in October 2024 after a year and a half at Harvey, where he was VP of partnerships.
The news comes as the legal AI sector is hotter than ever. Last month, Freshfields a multi-year partnership with Claude developer Anthropic last month, in a deal that will see the firm work with Anthropic to develop ‘novel legal agentic workflows.’
Historically, firms have turned to specialist providers for their legal tech solutions. Firms including Slaughter and May, A&O Shearman, Latham & Watkins and Ashurst have all confirmed firmwide rollouts of Harvey, while Linklaters, White & Case, Addleshaw Goddard and Herbert Smith Freehills have confirmed rollouts of Legora.
On the subject of AI, one managing partner told LB: ‘Someone said to me: first of all, the lawyers denied it was happening; second, they thought they could build their own systems, and eventually they realised they had to go to the experts.’
The recent moves from Kirkland and Freshfields show that firms can also find ways to combine these second and third options.
‘A glimpse into the future’ – Freshfields on how its Anthropic tie-up changes the game
