Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer

Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer — formed in June 2025 through the combination of Herbert Smith Freehills and Kramer Levin — operates at significant scale: 2,700 lawyers across 26 offices globally. As generative AI matured beyond experimentation, the firm faced the challenge of moving from a fragmented collection of point solutions and pilots toward a unified, firmwide AI strategy with appropriate governance and quality standards. Without a general-purpose platform capable of spanning drafting, document analysis, knowledge tasks, and client collaboration, the firm risked inconsistent adoption, duplicated tooling, and limited ability to deliver AI-powered services directly to clients.

The firm selected Legora — a platform positioned as an 'intelligent legal colleague' — as its firmwide, general-purpose AI platform, deploying it in phases across the business. Legora's large language model-based capabilities cover drafting, document analysis, insight generation, data analysis, summarisation, and translation. Critically, the firm also plans to adopt Legora's client portal, enabling secure collaboration and document sharing directly with clients within the same platform. Legora integrates alongside an existing portfolio of specialist tools: Harvey for legal drafting, Relativity for eDiscovery, Wexler.ai, and Cicero. The rollout is governed by the firm's Chief AI Officer, Ilona Logvinova, appointed in 2025, and supported by a dedicated multidisciplinary Digital Legal Delivery practice spanning legal experts, technologists, legal operations professionals, and project managers.

The phased firmwide rollout establishes Legora as the central layer of the firm's AI technology stack, complementing specialist tools rather than replacing them. Key outcomes include:

• Firmwide access to AI-assisted drafting, summarisation, and document analysis for 2,700 lawyers across 26 offices
• Client-facing capability via the Legora portal, enabling AI-powered document delivery and secure collaboration with external clients
• Governance maturity: the deployment is structured around internal training standards and quality controls, reflecting over 15 years of legal technology investment now formalised under a dedicated Chief AI Officer

The firm's Australia and Asia teams specifically highlighted over a decade of active AI deployment for clients, with Legora accelerating that foundation.

• Global law firms at scale benefit from a portfolio AI architecture — combining specialist tools (eDiscovery, contract review) with a general-purpose assistant layer — rather than betting on a single platform.
• Client-facing AI portals are becoming a competitive differentiator; firms that extend AI capabilities to clients, not just internal users, open new service delivery models.
• Appointing a Chief AI Officer and creating a dedicated Digital Legal Delivery practice signals the governance infrastructure needed to move from pilots to firmwide deployment.
• Phased rollouts allow quality standards and lawyer training to keep pace with technology adoption, reducing risk of inconsistent or ungoverned use.