The firm will put more than 5% of revenue into AI over five years and ask every lawyer to spend part of their billable time building tools.
A&O Shearman will invest about US$1 billion (£800 million) in artificial intelligence over the next five years and will require its lawyers to spend part of their billable time building it, Legal Cheek reported.
Under the plan, the Magic Circle firm will put more than 5% of annual revenue into AI, and lawyers in every practice will set aside at least 3% of their billable hours to help develop tools for their own areas of work. The aim, the firm says, is to build systems around its lawyers' expertise rather than rely only on products bought off the shelf, after several years of experiments.
A&O Shearman was among the first large law firms to adopt Harvey, which it began testing in 2022, and it has since developed AI products of its own. The announcement follows other large-firm moves: Legal Cheek noted that Freshfields agreed a partnership with Anthropic earlier this year that gave nearly 6,000 staff access to its Claude models.
