Davis Wright Tremaine LLP

Legal aid and client intake have long depended on in-person attorney interviews to complete standardized government and organizational forms—a model that is slow, expensive, and inaccessible to clients without reliable access to counsel. For an AmLaw 100 firm like Davis Wright Tremaine, serving clients in sensitive matters such as domestic violence and immigration, the stakes of an inadequate intake process are high. Existing AI tools introduced new risks rather than solving the problem: general-purpose models are prone to hallucination, lack the emotional sensitivity required in trauma-adjacent contexts, and failed to meet the increasingly complex form-completion requirements of major clients.

DWT's internal R&D unit, De Novo, built Crescendo—a proprietary conversational AI engine trained on DWT's own language model, dwt.ai—to invert the standard AI paradigm. Rather than prompting an AI to generate answers, Crescendo reverse-engineers official government and organizational forms into structured, empathic chat-based interviews. The system uses conversational AI to ask questions, gather unstructured client responses, and convert them into fully populated, properly templated forms ready for attorney review. Designed with emotional intelligence to mirror the nuance of in-person interviews, Crescendo was developed rapidly by De Novo in direct response to a major client's request, deploying on DWT's own infrastructure without reliance on third-party AI vendors.

Crescendo eliminated the requirement for a lawyer to be present during initial form completion, making standardized legal forms accessible to anyone with a voice- and internet-enabled device at any time. The qualitative outcomes are significant:

• 2025 ILTA Transformative Project of the Year Award — recognized by the International Legal Technology Association for innovation in leveraging technology within the legal profession
• Financial Times 'Standout' designation for Innovation in Digitizing Legal Practice in North America
• Dan Szabo, who led development, named a finalist for American Lawyer Media's 2025 Innovator of the Year in Tech Law
• DWT announced an alliance with Stanford's CodeX center for legal informatics to extend Crescendo's capabilities further

• Invert the AI paradigm when hallucination is a risk: using AI to ask questions rather than generate answers preserves accuracy and is better suited to structured data collection.
• Emotional intelligence is a design requirement, not an add-on: legal AI in sensitive contexts must be designed from the ground up for empathy and conversational fidelity.
• Proprietary models built on firm-specific data outperform general-purpose AI for specialized legal workflows where accuracy and security are non-negotiable.
• In-house R&D units can move faster than vendor procurement: De Novo developed and deployed Crescendo rapidly in direct response to a live client need.