Kirkland & Ellis sets aside $500m to build its own AI platform

In short: Kirkland & Ellis says it will spend $500 million to build its own in-house AI platform for legal work.

What happened

Kirkland & Ellis, the world’s highest-grossing law firm, has set aside $500 million to create its own AI platform. The firm’s chair, Jon Ballis, told the Financial Times it expects to spend more than $100 million this year, and then hundreds of millions more over the next three to four years.

The goal is to capture the “collective intelligence” of the firm’s lawyers inside one system. Think of it like turning the firm’s best internal playbooks and habits into a shared digital assistant that everyone at the firm can use.

Ballis said the firm will still pay for licences to use outside AI tools, but it does not want to rely only on tools that competitors can also buy. Outside companies are helping build the platform alongside Kirkland’s own engineers and data scientists, and Kirkland says it will own the technology. Ballis said 180 tech professionals are working on it, and the platform is being designed using input from 250 Kirkland lawyers, including 100 partners.

Kirkland plans to pay for the investment out of its revenue, which could reduce profit shared among equity partners in the short term. The firm reported $10.6 billion in revenue last year. It said the platform name and the tech companies involved will be disclosed in the coming weeks.

Why it matters

Law firms are using AI more, but recent court incidents show the risks. Some firms have been reprimanded after AI produced false information, sometimes called “hallucinations” (when an AI system confidently makes things up). Kirkland’s move signals that big firms may try to build more controlled, in-house systems, and it could speed up changes to how clients are billed as routine work becomes more automated.

Source: Financial Times