The Brief:
Kirkland & Ellis is spending US$500m to build its own proprietary AI platform, drawing on the “collective intelligence” of its lawyers.
The world’s highest-grossing law firm will own the tech outright, and nobody else can sell it.
Kirkland & Ellis is going all-in on AI, and it’s not buying what everyone else is buying.
The world’s highest-grossing law firm is building its own AI platform at a cost of US$500m. More than US$100m is earmarked for this year alone, with hundreds of millions more to follow over the next three to four years. The firm will pay out of revenues, meaning partners take a short-term hit to distributions.
The idea is that we’re going to take the collective intelligence of our institution and be able to deploy that throughout our firm.
The platform is being designed using input from 250 Kirkland lawyers, including 100 partners, with 180 tech professionals working on it in total. Outside companies are involved in building the technology but they won’t be able to sell it. Kirkland will “own, or have the right to own, all of it.”
Ballis was blunt about why off-the-shelf tools aren’t enough. Widely available AI was “raising the floor for everyone,” he said, but Kirkland had to do more, because “we don’t get hired for the floor.”
The platform is designed to cover mandates end-to-end, drawing on partner knowledge fed into the system, rather than lawyers piecing together individual tools for specific tasks. The platform name and the tech companies involved are set to be disclosed in the coming weeks.
The investment lands as BigLaw’s AI strategy splits into two clear camps. Most of the market has backed Harvey or Legora, both of which are signing new firm deals weekly. A smaller group is building. Freshfields cut a deal with Anthropic in April, co-developing legal AI tools with the option to license them to rivals down the track. Cleary Gottlieb acquired gen AI company Springbok in March 2025 to build custom solutions in-house.
Kirkland is taking that logic further than anyone. Keep it in-house. Own the IP. Don’t share.
Source: Financial Times