Pioneer spotlight: How AI makes us better business partners

It's a great question Elizabeth. So, the AI landscape is moving at lightning speed, as of course, you know. That's why we went for a buy, build, partner strategy. We will buy best-in-class tools available on the market where, for example, they give us access to a data set we couldn't get somewhere else or where we need really significant scale. We build where there are particular custom uses for clients or for practices that we simply can't procure out in the market. They're not on the roadmap of a third-party tool. So, we built our own AI platform called Atlas, completely secure and safe, and White & Case-branded and owned. And finally, we partner where we can see really strategic first-mover advantage with cutting-edge providers. Our latest strategic partnership is with Legora, who, as you know, is a leading legal AI workbench in the AI space. And that strategy of build, buy, partner keeps us really flexible and agile to serve our clients better.

AI can deliver so much value to our clients, which is why we're seeing it as such a core strategic priority for the Firm. Of course, there's efficiency gains, that goes without saying, but there are other stores of value too, if we use these tools really smartly. There's the ability to deliver greater global consistency to our clients, which is critical because we are a global firm and our client base is also global. Also, faster response times, which AI enables. And the third value is really around deeper insights. We hold a lot of data and knowledge and expertise in our firm, and we want to use that data and that knowledge and that expertise, combine it with AI to deliver real insights back to our clients. So really, AI makes us better business partners to our clients.

We've got a Responsible AI Committee and that reports into our Global Risk Management Committee, and we've got several areas of focus. Firstly, we make sure that any work product produced by our lawyers gets a human review before it goes out to our clients. That is absolutely non-negotiable. We have a very robust generative AI and AI policy. We never train with client data, any kind of LLM or application or product. And we make sure that our people always undergo their mandatory training and stay up to date. 

So Legora is a really standout leading-edge AI platform. As you know, because I know you're a big user, Elizabeth. And we're the first truly global firm to partner with Legora. And it's a genuine strategic partnership. And that means that we're working with them to meaningfully influence their roadmap. We get early sight of their new features, and we can guide them on what works really well for our practitioners, and we can collaborate with them on custom builds for our clients.

So, we've got, as you'd expect, a really robust global training program for all our lawyers and all our people at the Firm. But we go beyond that, because we really want people to develop an innovation mindset as well as that skillset. So, we give our lawyers space to experiment and to learn, and we make sure that we incentivize and reward that activity as well.

Thanks so much, Elizabeth.