Linklaters

Across the legal industry, many firms had acquired generative AI licenses but struggled to move beyond surface-level adoption — tools were purchased but never embedded into day-to-day legal work in any systematic way. Linklaters identified this as a critical risk: without genuine organizational embedding, AI investments deliver no competitive advantage. The firm also faced a practical capability gap — existing tools could not reliably handle the large documents and voluminous document sets central to complex transactional and due diligence work. Critically, adoption was skewing toward associates rather than partners, undermining the cultural shift needed to make AI use the norm rather than the exception across a 30-office global network.

Following a rigorous competitive selection process launched at the start of 2025, Linklaters ran quantitative and qualitative trials across five practice groups before selecting Legora, a Swedish-founded generative AI platform built on large language models. The firmwide deployment spanned all 30 offices with in-person training delivered over four to five weeks. Legora's ability to process large documents and large document sets — along with its tabular review feature, which extracts key data points from documents into a structured grid for due diligence workflows — were decisive technical differentiators. Linklaters also ran dedicated partner workshops at its partners conference to drive adoption from the top down, supplemented by ongoing office hours provided directly by the Legora team. The firm's existing GenAI chatbot Laila was retained with its future development kept under review.

Partners across Linklaters' global network are independently discovering unexpected use cases and reporting they can deliver better client service directly through Legora — without delegating to associates. The firmwide rollout achieved coverage across all 30 offices, with in-person training reaching nearly the entire global network within weeks of launch. Key outcomes include:

• Partner-level adoption achieved through intentional top-down training, shifting AI from associate tool to firm-wide practice
• Tabular review adopted for due diligence, enabling structured data extraction from large document sets
• A joint go-to-market arrangement established, with Linklaters and Legora attending client meetings together to co-develop solutions

• Embed, don't just deploy: purchasing licenses is insufficient — firms must build structured onboarding, office hours, and practice-group trials to achieve genuine BAU embedding.
• Train partners first: top-down adoption signals that AI is a professional tool, not a task to delegate; partner workshops drove broader organizational buy-in.
• Vendor relationship quality matters: working-style alignment and trust in the vendor team proved as important as the technology during selection.
• Tabular review unlocks due diligence value: structured data extraction from large document sets is a high-impact use case worth prioritizing in any legal AI rollout.
• Proprietary data is the next frontier: combining firm expertise and internal data with AI is where lasting competitive differentiation will emerge.