Tilleke & Gibbins

Tilleke & Gibbins, a full-service regional law firm spanning six Southeast Asian jurisdictions — Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam — faced mounting pressure to deliver consistent, high-quality legal work across markets with distinct regulatory frameworks, languages, and legal traditions. Attorneys handling complex cross-border matters in areas such as corporate/M&A, intellectual property, employment, and regulatory affairs spent disproportionate time on drafting, research, and document review tasks. Maintaining quality and consistency at scale across geographically dispersed offices, while meeting the expectations of multinational clients, created a structural bottleneck that manual workflows could not resolve efficiently.

In August 2025, Tilleke & Gibbins adopted Harvey, an enterprise-grade AI platform built specifically for the global legal industry, and initiated a firm-wide rollout across all six Southeast Asian offices. Harvey applies large language models and generative AI to legal drafting, research synthesis, and document review — tasks where jurisdiction-specific nuance and precision are critical. The deployment built directly on the firm's earlier Microsoft Copilot rollout, reflecting a deliberate, layered approach to AI adoption rather than a single-point implementation. Security and confidentiality protections are embedded in Harvey's architecture, addressing the data sensitivity requirements inherent in legal practice. The firm also plans to develop bespoke agentic workflows within Harvey tailored to its core practice areas and the specific regulatory environments of Southeast Asian markets.

The full Harvey platform became available to legal professionals across all six country offices following rollout, covering practice groups ranging from banking and finance to dispute resolution and intellectual property. Attorneys gained AI-assisted capabilities for drafting, legal research, and review on complex multi-jurisdictional matters — reducing time spent on high-volume foundational tasks. Key outcomes include:

• Firm-wide access: All Southeast Asia offices onboarded simultaneously, avoiding piecemeal adoption gaps
• Built on existing infrastructure: Integration with the prior Microsoft Copilot deployment reduced friction and change-management overhead
• Foundation for agentic workflows: Custom workflow development planned to address region-specific legal requirements, enabling deeper automation over time

• Law firms operating across multiple jurisdictions benefit most from AI platforms purpose-built for legal work, where domain-specific training reduces the risk of generic or jurisdictionally inaccurate outputs.
• A sequential technology adoption strategy — general-purpose productivity AI first, then specialized legal AI — lowers adoption barriers and builds internal AI fluency before introducing more complex tooling.
• Enterprise security and confidentiality architecture is a non-negotiable prerequisite for legal AI deployments, given client data obligations.
• Bespoke agentic workflows tailored to local legal market requirements represent the next frontier for regional law firms seeking sustainable competitive differentiation.