Business of law: case studies

Read the other FT Innovative Lawyers Asia-Pacific ‘Best practice case studies’, which showcase the standout innovations made for and by people working in the legal sector:

Practice of law
In-house

Standout

WINNER: Gilbert + Tobin
Originality: 8; Leadership: 9; Impact: 8; Total: 25
Last year, the firm ran an “AI Bounty” competition, offering staff a total of A$20,000 in prizes for their best ideas on deploying artificial intelligence at work. The contest attracted 106 submissions, with the money split among five main award winners and 50 smaller prizes. The firm will develop the best ideas identified, including tools to review a privacy policy and enhance due diligence.

Inkling Legal Design
O: 9; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 24
The firm developed an online course that encourages writing in plain, straightforward English and provides a benchmark against which other lawyers can compare how well they write about ambiguous areas of law. The application, which launched last year, is designed to improve efficiency and accuracy when writing and has been used by eight clients so far.

Highly commended

Lander & Rogers
O: 8; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 23
In its continuing partnership with Melbourne’s Monash University, the Australian firm invited five law students — dubbed “AI investigative agents” — to interview practice group heads and work with the firm’s innovation team to examine scenarios in which the technology might be applied. The training initiative identified more than 40 examples for possible use and the students’ insights on the topic have been published by the firm.

MinterEllison
O: 7; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 22
The firm created its own internal cryptocurrency to reward staff for taking part in its online training sessions. The so-called Mintcoins can be exchanged internally for charity donations or gift cards and have helped encourage the completion of more than 1,900 training modules by 850 people.

Rajah & Tann Singapore
O: 7; L: 7; I: 8; Total: 22
The firm identified several common skills and qualities required by its lawyers working across the various business sectors, jurisdictions and languages in the region. These include project management and communication skills aside from specific legal knowledge. Lawyers can receive 50-plus hours of training and at least half of the programme comprises practical activities.

Commended

Ashurst
O: 6; L: 7; I: 8; Total: 21
Lawyers at the firm can now use an online tool to highlight their availability and expertise, to help with allocation of work. In the first eight months of use, it received more than 720 notifications of availability from lawyers across the firm’s Asia-Pacific offices.

Khaitan & Co
O: 7; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 21
The firm worked with a consultancy to set up a process that assesses lawyers in areas such as productivity and business development skills, to decide if they are ready for partnership promotion.

Nagashima Ohno & Tsunematsu
O: 8; L: 6; I: 6; Total: 20
The firm created a programme where associates work with partners to develop new client relationships in emerging practice areas. These areas include the latest tech developments, sports, and agriculture and fishing industries.

King & Wood Mallesons
O: 6; L: 6; I: 7; Total: 19
The firm added new modules in AI, process improvement and change management to its “legal transformation belts” programme, which grades and certifies digital skills and is also available to clients.

Standout

WINNER: MinterEllison
Originality: 7; Leadership: 9; Impact: 8; Total: 24
In December 2023, the firm’s environment and planning team led a pilot of a generative AI tool that can draft legal documents that are roughly 80 per cent assembled in under a minute. Replicating a junior lawyer’s work, the model draws information from a repository of the firm’s historic advice, and other sources, to provide a draft that senior lawyers can check and amend. The pilot involved 50 lawyers and the firm now plans to roll out the tool across the practices.
Commended individual: Simon Ball

Highly commended

King & Wood Mallesons
O: 7; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 23
The firm’s commercial real estate practice developed a system based on records of past property transactions to identify market trends across Asia. Using data visualisation software, the tool helps identify patterns across the firm’s global property work, such as popular drafting clauses and market standards. According to the firm, the tool has reduced typical time taken for some research tasks from up to four hours to just minutes.

JunHe
O: 6; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 22
To encourage use of its knowledge-management system, the Chinese firm added training materials along with a feature that automatically logs when training sessions are taken. The firm also rewards its 700-plus lawyers for adding good quality data to the platform by tying this to their bonuses. This has led to an increase in activity on the platform, with 25,000 clicks recorded per month in 2023.

Khaitan & Co
O: 8; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 22
The firm sifted 17mn items to identify 841,000 relevant documents for future case work and integrate them into a searchable system. AI tools, under development, will be able to create summaries of the documents and perform predictive analysis on contracts.

Commended

Anand and Anand
O: 7; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 21
The Indian firm created a “matter knowledge” bank where users can search for a case and generate a summary of relevant details. It spent three years digitising decades’ worth of physical documents and started using the repository in June 2023. The firm hopes to improve processes such as document drafting and trial preparation and encourage internal collaboration.

Clifford Chance
O: 6; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 20
The firm developed a tool to help with billing when a client’s requirements change during a transaction, and launched it in the Asia-Pacific region. The spreadsheet-based system gives an improved overview of work done on particular case work with live projections, allowing significantly faster billing decisions.

Sprintlaw
O: 7; L: 8; I: 5; Total: 20
In 2023, the Australian firm launched a knowledge-sharing platform for staff servicing smaller businesses. The internal resource has halved the time taken for its lawyers to create some documents, such as standard shareholder agreements.

Hogan Lovells
O: 6; L: 7; I: 6; Total: 19
The lawyers conducted a document review for an anti-bribery investigation using AI software that required training in Vietnamese. The subsequent search has identified 150,000 documents for scrutiny by lawyers.

Standout

WINNER: Clifford Chance
Originality: 8; Leadership: 9; Impact: 8; Total: 25
The firm partnered with tech company Microsoft to create a generative artificial intelligence bot, launched in late October, that tracks and summarises press releases published by Hong Kong regulators.

Lawyers in the region took the lead on ensuring the tool had appropriate understanding of legal jargon and included a summarisation and context extraction function that will save the firm an estimated 480 hours of associate and trainee time per year. Output can be turned into interactive graphs and trends, which the lawyers use to advise clients.

Yulchon
O: 8; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 23
The South Korean firm created a service to help clients better comply with the country’s Serious Accidents Punishment Act (SAPA), introduced in 2022, which puts greater responsibility on businesses to ensure safety in their operations and facilities.

The service involves a free self-diagnosis tool that shows clients where they are most at risk of violating SAPA. The firm also uses automation to track news reports of SAPA-related incidents and has created a training programme with videos offering insights into the law. The programme uses an AI-powered search engine to help clients find specific information.

Highly commended

Clayton Utz
O: 7; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 22
The Sydney-based firm launched an AI-generated compliance portal, Obligations Navigator, in December 2023. In a client assessment, the portal analysed 100 examples of case law and produced a hyperlinked list of 42,000 obligations, described in plain English and checked by human lawyers. Summarising compliance requirements can be labour-intensive, so the portal saves time and resources and gives the client a clear and comprehensive compliance process — helping them understand which obligations they must comply with, and how.

Commended

Lander & Rogers
O: 7; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 21
The Australian firm developed an AI tool to extract relevant information from files submitted alongside compensation claims. The innovation and compensation law teams partnered with the firm’s legal tech incubator, Halisok, to digitise the manually-intensive sorting process in mass litigation and class action suits.

Nagashima Ohno & Tsunematsu
O: 5; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 21
Led by managing partner Soichiro Fujiwara, the firm’s technology start-up MNTSQ designed an AI-powered search engine that allows lawyers to search an internal contract database for relevant Japanese clauses and provisions, after the firm found public search engines such as Google were insufficient.

Rajah & Tann Singapore
O: 7; L: 7; I: 6; Total: 20
In June 2023, Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority implemented new requirements for anti-money laundering checks in residential property purchases. The Singaporean law firm launched an AI tool that automates these due diligence checks of potential buyers, which is now used by 30 property developers in the country.

MinterEllison
O: 5; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 19
The firm developed a contract review tool to help mining group Anglo American manage its supply chain and contracts. The firm approached the miner — a long-term client — after it struggled with the management of contracts. Lawyers used the company’s data to build the tool from scratch in 2023.
Commended individual: Benjamin Fox

Standout

WINNER: A&O Shearman
Originality: 8; Leadership: 9; Impact: 8; Total: 25
In partnership with legal tech company Harvey, A&O Shearman (formerly Allen & Overy) was among the first law firms to make wide use of a generative AI tool in early 2023.

Capitalising on the publicity this created, it then launched an AI client working group in Asia Pacific where 81 participants from 19 companies paid the firm for advice on generative AI’s potential legal implications and practical lessons about adoption of the technology in a big organisation.

Highly Commended

Ashurst
O: 7; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 23
The firm has run pilots and trials of generative AI that involved more than 400 staff in 23 offices including a competition to identify future applications and blind trials testing applications against humans. The strategy has been implemented worldwide, with a prominent role played by the team from Australia. The firm says nearly 90 per cent of staff felt its technology focus was preparing them for the coming years.

Mayer Brown
O: 7; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 23
The Hong Kong office led the rollout in 2023 of AI tool Harvey for use in research, drafting, and data analysis. It is also used to cut the time spent summarising local case law, to improve due diligence, and Chinese-to-English translations.

PwC Asia Pacific
O: 7; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 22
The firm’s Asia-Pacific business merged its legal and NewLaw legal services divisions to help clients implement related technology.

Internally, the firm is using AI tool Harvey and its own virtual assistant ChatPwC, as well as experimenting with other relevant tools. The firm recorded more than 18,000 queries being submitted to Harvey in the first six months of using it in the region and estimates that the application saved the firm 9,000 hours of time in that period.

Commended

Rajah & Tann Singapore
O: 6; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 21
The firm is working with its technology arm Rajah & Tann Technologies to bring in external software that will encourage lawyers to embrace digitisation fully and prepare for the future adoption of AI systems. Examples include applications that are designed to cut the time spent on research and to locate the relevant contract clauses from a centralised database.

JunHe
O: 6; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 20
The Chinese law firm’s tech team created a tool that automates the identification and redaction of sensitive material from documents. This tool helps lawyers protect sensitive data and better comply with data protection laws in China when using generative AI.

Trilegal
O: 6; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 20
Trilegal’s digital innovation group is leading technological advances at the Indian law firm, creating a knowledge management system and AI-based dashboards to monitor work progress and preparing existing systems to incorporate generative AI.

Standout

WINNER: Inkling Legal Design
Originality: 8; Leadership: 9; Impact: 8; Total: 25
The firm advised the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) on redesigning its commercial project agreements. The lawyers simplified the contracts used by the public research body for project partners, which predominantly include scientists with a non-legal background. Clauses were simplified and legal jargon removed, while retaining legal compliance and addressing complex scientific issues. Redesigning these contracts has led to greater collaboration between the legal department at ANSTO and other parties, internally and externally. Using digital tools and visuals made the contracts easier to navigate.

A&O Shearman
O: 7; L: 8; I: 9; Total: 24
In response to China’s property market crash, the firm developed an interactive portal to help co-ordinating committees representing bank lenders to navigate complex, large-scale corporate restructurings. The portal provides clients with access to resources relating to relevant restructurings, a Q&A tool and document review capabilities. Rapid access to comprehensive information and support saves clients time and money.

Highly commended

Lawpath
O: 6; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 22
The Australian firm is targeting smaller companies by providing low-cost access to software and document libraries that use AI to fill out contracts and agreements. A human lawyer can be involved to check documents or deal with more complex work if required.

Commended

Atsumi & Sakai
O: 6; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 21
The Tokyo-based law firm’s Policy Research Institute advised the Japanese government on emerging technology topics, such as developing AI regulation and the construction of a semiconductor factory.

Pinsent Masons
O: 7; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 21
The firm has broadened the legal services it offers at each stage of big renewable energy projects to offer clients a more integrated service — ranging from environmental, social and governance assessments to licensing and property transactions.
Commended individual: Mark Hu

KPMG Law
O: 5; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 20
The firm created a platform to assess how well equipped a company’s legal team is. The system, launched in 2022, uses a digital tool and questionnaires to gather data about the company and automates a report to help in-house teams assess their resourcing.

Keypoint Law
O: 5; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 19
The Australian firm is celebrating a decade of operating without billable hour targets or budgets. The policy aims to offer a more flexible working arrangement to lawyers. Partners are typically paid 70 per cent of the services they charge to clients but, if they do not earn, there is no guaranteed pay. The firm has grown to 75 partners since it was launched in 2014.