MinterEllison

MinterEllison, one of Australia's largest law firms with nearly two centuries of operation, faced mounting pressure to scale productivity without sacrificing the quality of legal counsel. Despite pioneering document and workflow automation since 2008 and building proprietary AI tools from 2016, the firm lacked a unified generative AI capability that could reach all practice groups and business operations staff simultaneously. In a profession where billable hours are finite and client expectations for speed and accuracy are rising, the cost of incremental, siloed tooling was measurable lost productivity — and a widening gap against the technology-driven transformation reshaping the broader legal industry.

MinterEllison joined Microsoft's Copilot for Microsoft 365 Early Access Program — one of only two Australian law firms selected. Copilot, powered by large language models and generative AI, was integrated directly into the Microsoft 365 environment staff already used daily, minimising adoption friction. Licences were distributed to lawyers, consultants, and business operations staff who completed a mandatory generative AI learning module through the firm's Digital Academy and submitted a concrete use case for the tool. A dedicated Microsoft Teams channel enabled peer knowledge sharing across practice groups, while an AI Centre of Excellence established governance guardrails covering accountability, privacy, security, and data bias. In parallel, the firm developed bespoke tools — including 'Chat with ME' (a private GPT-4 deployment on Azure) and the 'MinterEllison Advice Generator' built with Microsoft partner Arinco — extending generative AI into specialised legal workflows.

Early survey results from the Copilot rollout showed substantial and consistent productivity gains across the firm:

• 50% of users saved 2–5 hours per day
• Top 20% of users saved 5+ hours per day
• 89% of users rated Copilot for Microsoft 365 as intuitive
• 90% would recommend it to a colleague

Beyond the time savings, the rollout produced meaningful organisational change. The dedicated Teams channel broke down traditional silos, with staff across seniority levels collaborating on use cases in ways that had not occurred before. The MinterEllison Advice Generator reduced a task that previously required hours of junior lawyer time to under 30 seconds, and demand from partners spread rapidly across practice groups.

• Gating AI access behind a learning module and use-case submission filtered for motivated early adopters and built baseline competency before deployment.
• An AI Centre of Excellence with formal governance — covering data privacy, bias, and security — is prerequisite infrastructure for responsible experimentation in a risk-averse, client-confidential environment.
• Integrating generative AI into existing tooling (Microsoft 365) rather than introducing standalone platforms dramatically lowers the adoption barrier for non-technical staff.
• Board-level engagement signals strategic commitment and reduces organisational hesitancy; leadership at MinterEllison explicitly framed inaction as the greater risk.
• Plan for licence rotation from the outset to bring cautious or resistant staff into the programme over time, rather than concentrating adoption among early enthusiasts.