Amber Hickman |
Law firm A&O Shearman has improved efficiency by 30 per cent since building a new artificial intelligence-powered tool on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.
The solution, ContractMatrix, was built in collaboration with Microsoft and OpenAI-backed firm Harvey with the aim of speeding up the drafting, reviewing and negotiating process for contracts.
The tool, which currently has 1,900 global A&O Shearman lawyers using it and is available in multiple languages, has saved around seven hours from the average contract review
“It’s been essential having Azure as an environment,” said David Wakeling, partner and head of the Markets Innovation Group at A&O Shearman. “Without it, a tool of this flexibility and scale would have been unthinkable. Azure is designed perfectly for the robust scaling of a system like ContractMatrix and the secure hosting of data.”
To ensure the ethical use of AI in the tool, A&O Shearman adopted major governance principles for ContractMatrix and has integrated risk management into the tool’s design.
“You’re always going to have a lawyer who’s being augmented, not displaced,” said Wakeling. “Our system is grounded in leveraging high quality data sets. There’s always a cross verification against what the AI is suggesting.”
The tool is also now available on the Azure Marketplace for other organisations to use.