In the past 6 months, Legal AI, or the use of AI in law practice, has really accelerated.
Kirkland & Ellis recently made waves in announcing it is investing $500 million to build its own proprietary AI platform. According to Reuters, the firm planned to “invest the funds over the next three to four years, starting with $100 million in 2026.”
This week, Kirkland partner Erica Berthou demoed one of the firm’s AI engines, this one for private equity fundraising, at Palantir’s AIPCon10.
Here’s how Kirkland describes Berthou’s talk:
“Investment funds partner Erica Berthou presented a live demo of the platform, which brings together our institutional knowledge, data and workflows into an integrated system designed to support the entire private equity fundraising lifecycle, from fund documentation and investor solutions to side letter drafting, obligation tracking, closing commitments and ongoing compliance. By putting our partners’ experience and judgment at every Kirkland lawyer’s fingertips, we’re building a new model to deliver better outcomes and service to our clients.
“At the absolute beating heart of what we offer clients is our differentiated knowledge and judgment. We needed a platform that unlocked and leveraged those competitive advantages, while also ensuring fidelity to client confidences, ethical walls and data security. That’s why we built from the ground up our Fund Formation Engine, a new operating model for legal services,” Erica said.
Here are 2 diagrams, from her talk, depicting the workflow in how the AI platform tackles different tasks for a private equity project:
What used to take days for a lawyer to analyze, discuss, and draft now happens in minutes.
Investment funds partner Erica Berthou, Kirkland & Ellis
This works because every step of the drafting process is owned by a specialized agent.
One agent captures insights from comments and senior partners prior art.
Another one extracts and structures language from model documents.
Another agent draws new provisions and another folds feedback into each revision.
So if we turn towards the screen behind me, we will see the result of the special agent specialized agents working collaboratively. The underlying together with the specialized agents that’s what uniquely enables the outcome.
Will law firms now develop proprietary AI platforms and models?
Kirkland & Ellis’s $500 million investment in developing its own AI platforms is likely to put pressure on other Big Law firms to do the same.
We could be witnessing the beginning of the biggest transformation of the practice of law at law firms in the past 100 years.