Lenz & Staehelin

Lenz & Staehelin, one of Switzerland's leading law firms, faced a challenge common to large enterprise firms: attorneys could not efficiently access the firm's accumulated institutional knowledge and prior work product. Finding relevant precedents, past analyses, or internal expertise required manual document hunting across fragmented systems — a process that consumed billable time and limited the depth of insight attorneys could bring to client matters. In a competitive legal market where clients expect both speed and expertise, the inability to surface the firm's collective knowledge at the point of need represented a meaningful drag on service quality and operational efficiency.

Lenz & Staehelin partnered with DeepJudge, deploying its AI Workflows platform — an enterprise search system built by former Google AI researchers holding PhDs in Artificial Intelligence. The platform applies semantic search and retrieval to go beyond keyword matching, comprehending content, context, relevance, and institutional knowledge across the firm's entire document corpus. Rather than requiring attorneys to manually locate and upload documents to a separate AI tool, DeepJudge connects directly to existing firm data, making prior work product immediately accessible. The platform also includes built-in legal workflows and an AI Workflow Builder — a low-code interface enabling firms to construct custom, multi-step AI-powered applications tailored to specific practice group needs — giving Lenz & Staehelin both out-of-the-box utility and room to customize as adoption matured.

The rollout achieved a 90% adoption rate among legal professionals at Lenz & Staehelin — a result that is notable in an industry where attorney adoption of new technology has historically been slow. According to Fedor Poskriakov at the firm, attorneys can now access crucial knowledge more efficiently, uncover insights with greater ease, and deliver more value to clients. Qualitatively, the platform shifted how the firm engages with its own institutional knowledge — moving from reactive document retrieval to proactive AI-assisted research integrated into day-to-day matter work.

• 90% attorney adoption rate since launch
• Faster access to prior work product across the firm
• Improved ability to surface institutional expertise at the point of client need

• High attorney adoption (90%) is achievable when AI tools fit seamlessly into existing workflows rather than requiring behavioral change to access them.
• Connecting AI to a firm's complete historical work product — rather than curated document sets — unlocks compounding value as the knowledge base grows.
• Low-code workflow builders allow practice groups to adopt AI at their own pace, reducing top-down mandate friction.
• Semantic search that understands legal context outperforms keyword search for knowledge retrieval tasks where nuance and relevance matter most.
• Firms that involve practitioners in shaping AI tools during early deployment see stronger long-term engagement.