Professional services / Legal
A&O Shearman: Supporting complex legal work
- Company
- A&O Shearman
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Adoption stage
- Adoption announced
- Source published
- Date basis
- The date the source was published. It can differ from the date adoption started.
- How the source was checked
- Checked a source excerpt through a search tool
The work problem
Some legal work has to go through many steps and requires digging deep into material. Analysing competition filings and reviewing loans are that kind of work. The lawyers responsible have had to spend hours at a time on such tasks.
Technology and data
A&O Shearman decided to release, together with Harvey, a set of AI agents that reason across several steps. These agents hold expertise from the firm's main practice areas and carry out research and multi-step reasoning over matter documents and structured data. They break a complex problem into an executable plan, then gather the intermediate outputs into a single deliverable, and the process stays visible and supervised. The first four targets are competition filing analysis, cybersecurity, fund formation and loan review. The firm uses the agents internally and at the same time sells them to large companies, other law firms and financial companies on a subscription or usage basis.
Results
A&O Shearman said these agents are the first concrete agentic AI case to come out of a multinational law firm. The firm's head of AI said the agents do in minutes what used to take hours. The firm said it shares in the software revenue. The company explained that it already had experience with firm-wide generative AI adoption and with developing ContractMatrix.
Limits and open questions
This source is an announcement of something still to come, so it carries no figures on firm-wide adoption rate or accuracy change. The comparison between minutes and hours is also an explanation from a company representative.
Sources
- A&O Shearman and Harvey to roll out agentic AI agents targeting complex legal workflowsaoshearman.com, Accessed
Compiled from public sources. These are not results from ATF Works customers.