Hello, I’m Jennifer Ward, Chief Technology Officer at Arthur Cox. Across the legal industry, we’re seeing a fundamental shift in how legal services are delivered. We at Arthur Cox are seeing that as a great opportunity. We’ve built out a clear AI and innovation strategy which combines our legal expertise with technology advancements and builds on the judgement, trust, and quality that underpins our service to our clients every day. Innovation is part of the culture here at Arthur Cox and has been for decades.

So when capabilities such as generative AI and agentic AI present themselves, the natural response is to work with those capabilities to see how we can broaden our suite of services to our clients. Our AI strategy is multifaceted. Firstly, we’re building forward on our partnership with Microsoft to build out the capabilities presented in that ecosystem to become a legal frontier firm. Additionally, we’ve adopted Legora as our legal AI platform and have completed a firm-wide adoption programme earlier this year.

A key part of our strategy is the Innovation Lawyer Programme, bringing lawyers from across the firm, this team works at the intersection of legal expertise, technology, and innovation. They seek out the high-value processes and tools that can bring exceptional client engagements. What we’re also seeing is that client expectations are changing in line with technology advancements, so that allows us the opportunity to work on bespoke proprietary Arthur Cox technology which enables our clients in the most complex of matters.

As we look forward, our focus remains on embedding innovation into the very fabric of the firm. That means delivering responsible AI, enhancing our governance, scaling our initiatives, and developing the learnings that exist across the whole firm to deliver exceptional legal services. In summary, innovation isn’t a separate workstream at Arthur Cox. It is how we think, how we deliver, and how we act on behalf of our clients every day.

Jennifer Ward

Hello, I’m Jennifer Ward, Chief Technology Officer at Arthur Cox. I’m delighted to be here today with my colleagues to discuss our AI and innovation strategy. I’m joined today by James O’Doherty and Ciara Anderson. You’re both very welcome. James has a unique skill set of being both a lawyer and an engineer, and so is right at the cutting edge of that intersection of technology and law, and is also heading up our applied AI solutions. Ciara comes to us from the Tech and Innovation Practice Group, where you are practising as a technology lawyer with the firm. So you’re both very, very welcome, and I’ll turn first to you, James. James, I think it would be useful for listeners to understand what is an Innovation Lawyer Programme about and how does it work?

James O’Doherty

The idea behind the Innovation Lawyer Programme is that we second lawyers from their day-to-day work to work full-time for six months on embedding technology, and in particular AI solutions, into the firm’s practice. By taking them from their work, or from the groups that they’re already in, They have a unique perspective on what is urgent right now, what does the client need right now, and they know, they understand the way that the lawyers on their team work. That allows us to develop solutions that are really bespoke and made for them in particular.

Jennifer Ward

When you say come from their practice group, so they’re working in the technology team or closer with technology?

James O’Doherty

Yeah, we give them specific training on the technologies and how to build things themselves, but also for more complicated pieces of work, the different teams to refer to. So, we have my team, the AI solutions team, we have a legal technology team and we have a Microsoft team that can all build proprietary solutions here.

Jennifer Ward

Ciara, how have you found the programme so far?

Ciara Anderson

Yeah, it’s been really exciting, to be honest. So, what we do is the first part of the programme was incredible. We kind of did a big in-depth upskilling on all the different AI and tech tools that the firm has to offer. And then we were able to go back into the teams and we ran AI use case discovery sessions, and that’s where we pulled the use cases that you spoke of. And it was really amazing to see all the kind of creative ideas coming from partners, associates, and trainees. And then we took those ideas, we decided on what to prioritise, what was high impact. And then the innovation lawyers themselves have the capabilities now to kind of build a proof of concept. We can take that proof of concept then, and then we talk to the engineers and they can build a full solution. And then part of our role is acting as that conduit so we can jump back into the teams with the solution to do some testing and fine-tuning. And that’s worked excellent so far. It’s really incredible that we can have an idea on a Monday, a proof of concept on a Tuesday and essentially be doing some testing by the end of the week. So yeah, it’s been great.

Jennifer Ward

And maybe you’d explain to us the secondment type approach where you’re part of this programme for a period of time.

Ciara Anderson

Yeah, I think it’s genius. Obviously, we know that part-time doesn’t make sense with lawyers, so this full-time approach is fantastic. I’m able to go into teams and look them in the eye and say, this is my full-time job. If you give me an idea, I can build it, I can run it down, and I, you know, this is all I will be doing. But I think the second kind of genius with the programme is also that after six months, I’ll go back into my team with all of these learnings. And so I will still continue to be an innovation lawyer really in the team once I get back, and then we’ll have a new cohort that sits in a different team and will bring kind of a different level of expertise. And as you described before, we’ll have these kind of rotating, innovation pockets throughout the firm. And we’re already seeing the whole firm is using AI. This isn’t just certain, you know, kind of high-value teams or partners. So yeah, I think it’s only two months in and it’s pretty impressive.

Jennifer Ward

Great, and James, going forward, what are your key objectives for the programme over the coming months?

James O’Doherty

Our key goals are to lead on AI literacy and just embedding it across the entire firm and having every lawyer being at the cutting edge of that. But then  our other goal is we’ve already delivered a number of larger projects that really required bespoke AI solutions. So our plan is also to keep building that out.

Jennifer Ward

Yeah, and that proprietary tech, that’s the part that will differentiate Arthur Cox and our strategy in the future. That seems to be a trend now that we’re seeing, if we kind of looked at it maybe two years ago, it was all about the platforms, the legal tech platforms, the Harveys, the Legoras. Now we’re seeing a lot more differentiated build of AI solutions across firms across the world. That’s a core part of the strategy.

James O’Doherty

Absolutely. Yeah. And I think Arthur Cox was investing in this earlier, and I think it’s given us a real head start. I think it’s something that will continue to differentiate us.

Jennifer Ward

Great. To conclude, we can definitely see through this discussion that the way legal services are delivered is changing. That’s really just a fact. But that the judgement and reliability of Arthur Cox and its past is core to how we move forward with that technology. Clients will continue, obviously, to rely on Arthur Cox for everything that they have done so in the past, which is their trusted advice, their sound judgement, the high assurance, and the knowledge of our ability to execute. We will just be doing that now in a slightly more efficient way and offering more services to those clients. Thank you, James and Ciara.