Fisher Phillips LLP

By late 2022, Fisher Phillips LLP recognized that generative AI would reshape legal service delivery, but the market was immature and the path forward unclear. As a large labor and employment firm, waiting for technology to stabilize was not a viable option — competitors who moved first would gain compounding advantages in attorney efficiency, research depth, and client value. The firm needed to engage attorneys with emerging tools immediately, without a proven vendor landscape to draw from, while ensuring any deployed technology met the security and confidentiality standards non-negotiable in legal practice. Inaction meant falling behind on a generational shift in how legal work gets done.

Fisher Phillips took an unconventional approach: rather than evaluating finished products, the firm became a founding design partner for multiple GenAI platforms built on large language models. It collaborated directly with Casetext during the development of CoCounsel — a legal-specific LLM tool — becoming the first law firm in the world to deploy it. The firm subsequently became the inaugural law firm customer of both Hebbia, which applies LLMs to document-intensive analysis, and TrellisAI, which targets litigation intelligence. Fisher Phillips also served as a design partner and first customer for Verbit's LegalVisor, a GenAI-powered transcription and legal workflow product. Across each engagement, the firm's attorneys worked directly with vendor teams to shape product behavior, test edge cases, and validate real-world performance before general release.

After more than two years of active GenAI deployment, Fisher Phillips has built one of the most mature multi-tool AI stacks in the legal industry. Attorneys across the firm use CoCounsel, Hebbia, TrellisAI, and LegalVisor for complementary workflows — from legal research and document review to litigation prep and transcription. The firm reports meaningfully faster and higher-quality work product delivery, though specific throughput or time-savings metrics were not disclosed publicly. Key qualitative outcomes include:

• Broad attorney adoption driven by early exposure and hands-on familiarity with each tool
• Influence over product direction through design-partner status across four vendors
• Reduced evaluation risk by participating in testing before general availability

• Being a design partner rather than a late-stage buyer gives firms disproportionate influence over product roadmaps and priority access to capabilities before competitors.
• A diversified GenAI stack across research, document analysis, litigation intelligence, and transcription covers more workflow surface area than any single platform can.
• Security and confidentiality compliance is a hard threshold — no amount of functionality justifies a vendor who cannot meet legal-industry data standards.
• Early, hands-on attorney engagement drives adoption; waiting for a "mature" market delays the internal learning curve that matters most.
• Firms that move at vendor speed gain credibility and access unavailable to passive buyers.