In March, this site showed how Harvey is rolling out agentic AI systems. Now, A&O Shearman (AOS) is to sell agentic tools to clients and other law firms, and it will ‘share in the software revenue’.
AOS notes that ‘the agents [it is developing with Harvey] will integrate A&O Shearman’s legal expertise and will be rolled out internally as well as being sold to clients and other law firms’.
They then added that these tools will be ‘available to large corporations, law firms, and financial services via subscription or usage-based fees; A&O Shearman will share in the software revenue.’
So, let’s just repeat the last bit – they will sell this capability, i.e. AOS’s refined agentic capabilities ‘to other law firms’ and share in the financial benefits with Harvey.
Now, the former Allen & Overy has form for building tools that it sells to the market, e.g. it pioneered using expert systems to provide a range of tools, such as for risk management, via AOSphere, as far back as 2002. Although in 2023, ahead of the Shearman merger the group was sold off.
And the firm added that in 2023, AOS became the ‘first firm globally to build an AI app for in-house counsel by collaborating with Harvey and Microsoft to create ContractMatrix, an AI-powered contract tool’.
Anyway, back to the new AI agent bit.
AOS said that the ‘the initial agents focus on antitrust filing analysis, cybersecurity, fund formation, and loan review: high-value areas requiring deep legal expertise and multi-step reasoning’.
They explained that the agents ‘break down complex issues into actionable plans, finish them interdependently, and combine intermediate outputs into complete work products with transparency and oversight’.
David Wakeling, Global Head of AI Advisory and the Markets Innovation Group at AOS, said: ‘There has been a lot of hype, but these agents are the first concrete legal use-cases of agentic AI within a multinational law firm – and therefore within much of the commercial landscape. These agents do in minutes what previously took several hours, and frustrated people.’
While Winston Weinberg, CEO and co-founder of Harvey, added: ‘For decades, the legal industry has relied on the same structure and approach to deliver results for clients. Together with A&O Shearman, Harvey is building agentic workflows that save tremendous amounts of time without sacrificing accuracy and trust.’
And, James Webber, antitrust partner at A&O Shearman, noted: ‘All lawyers working on antitrust matters have had that sinking feeling – usually around 3am – of ‘there must be an easier and quicker way of doing this’. And this is the way to do it…..is the hint.
So, is this a big deal? Well, as noted, AOS has a history – as do other law firms – of building products, or co-developing products, for sale to the market. Macfarlanes has also recently done a deal with Harvey to build client-facing capabilities for the market.
The real question is: how much of an impact will it have?
It would be unusual if this cannibalised any of AOS’s work that the partners really, really wanted to hold onto, so, it’s likely more of a strategy around providing support for what is likely to get commoditized in any case, and to lead the way there by going early to the market.
The bit about selling to other law firms may also seem odd – but again, other firms have done this before. However, the reality is that such offers have not in the past made a massive difference there either.
Moreover, the firm doesn’t really spell out in detail how this will be used, other than the broad areas, e.g. anti-trust issues. Based on previous patterns, it’s most likely to be around fairly arduous fact-finding tasks around regulatory compliance related to those areas, or similar tasks, rather than for giving specific ‘bet the company’, top-tier advice.
In that regard – if that is the case here – then it’s simply a logical extension of what they did before with AOSphere, but now with an agentic AI aspect to it. E.g. ‘Please find info on this regulatory need for me, summarise it, pull out the top three issues and email it to me’….or something like that…perhaps. It could also be even closer to what AOSphere did before, which was to help lawyers to complete very complex forms and get the right info out of multi-question compliance checklists. But, we shall see.
Overall, there is clearly a strong marketing element to this, which is understandable. After all, law firms are in the business not just of serving their clients, but of winning new clients and holding onto existing ones. So, marketing should not be under-valued.
Will this change the game? Probably not…..yet. If they were outsourcing their core billable work to agentic tools and selling incredibly valuable proprietary knowhow to other law firms then that would be a game-changer for real. This is more likely a positive step that shows what could be done more broadly across the market, but is not intended to disrupt the core work of the firm.
In either case, it’s good to see and hopefully will lead to more ambitious projects to come. Plus, it’s a very nice win for Harvey in terms of customer buy-in and engagement.
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See more about Harvey and its agentic tools here.