The impact has been transformational. Within a month of rollout, 97% of weekly active users were working in the Agent. Combined, Linklaters' lawyers around the world have now spent over 35 years on the platform since deployment.

Kris Sales, Product Owner for Legora, says, “I don't think we've ever had a technology product become so popular so quickly.” Kris has been involved with Legora since the very first conversations, through the proof of concept, the deployment, and now day-to-day operation.

Alongside him, Tom Quoroll and Sarah Barnard sit at the centre of Linklaters' relationship with Legora. Together they steer the firm's AI strategy, work that covers everything from tool rollouts to the strategic questions AI raises about the firm’s business model and how it trains the lawyers of the future.

As one of the world’s largest law firms, Linklaters is often engaged by clients on highly complex matters that span multiple legal jurisdictions. That means the opportunity to take advantage of the benefits of AI is a global one, and Legora has been rolled out across Linklaters’ firm-wide as a result, but it also makes the work around adoption and the partnership with technology providers even more important.

In their roles, Tom and Sarah are thinking deeply about how AI is deployed and adopted effectively and responsibly across Linklaters, as well as assessing the granular matter level data to understand when and where AI is being used to deliver benefits – both areas where the partnership with Legora has paid dividends.

On the frontline of client delivery, the pair also recently founded Applied Intelligence, a new practice group bringing data scientists and lawyers together under one roof to work on clients’ most complex problems.

Sarah is Linklaters’ Director of AI Delivery, responsible for taking that strategy and transferring it into a credible working practice, with measurable growth to show for it month on month.

As Tom puts it: “Between the three of us, you have the team required to transform a law firm. We're each bringing different parts of the puzzle.”

The impact of the partnership

• Firm-wide weekly active use rose almost 15% since the Legora Agent was rolled out, against a user base that expanded faster still (growing by approximately 20%) as Legora was adopted more widely across the firm.

• Partner engagement strengthened over the same period: monthly active partners rose from 65% to almost 80%, which is one of the fastest partner adoption ramps either Linklaters or Legora has seen.

• Monthly adoption of the Legora Agent now stands at 70%.

Working closely with Legora’s Legal Engineers, Tom, Sarah and Kris have turned a technology rollout into a genuine change in how the firm operates. Here’s how they achieved it.

A peer-led approach to adoption

When the Linklaters team started evaluating AI platforms, they had already worked through two rounds of AI tooling. This meant the firm went into the process focused less on demos and more on how the right platform would actually feel in a lawyer's hands. “We had quite a high bar to start from in some ways,” says Kris, “because our users knew what they wanted.” When Legora reached those users, the feedback came back fast. “It was a much simpler interface, they just got on with it better,” says Kris. The Word add-in proved popular, as did the dedicated support from Legora.

Linklaters ran an enhanced proof of concept across five practice groups ahead of its global partner conference. At the conference, the firm announced Legora from the main stage and gave partners hands-on demos. “Partners quickly moved on from the artificial exercises to their own live work,” says Tom. “They had something to review that afternoon, so they gave it a go, and they were getting good results.” The firm launched firm-wide days later.

Partners were trained by Kris, who has spent close to eleven years in the technology function of law firms. Legora also embedded legal engineers, qualified lawyers themselves, directly into practice groups from day one. Because those legal engineers already knew the contracts and the process, their training sessions could focus entirely on the product.

“We consciously decided the people teaching partners should be their peers,” explains Sarah. She built a group of twelve partners, and Kris ran the training with them until they felt confident. That peer-led approach is what Linklaters credits for the sharp jump in partner usage that followed its training weeks.

“We spent a lot of time thinking about the psychology of the individual, how to make sure people understand the tooling and feel confident enough to drive it themselves, rather than just standing at the back of the room saying, ‘this is important’,” she says. “We were the first to say, ‘this is how you implement change: not just tone from the top, but action from the top’. And that's quite unique. In our tech rollouts, generally, you get a partner sponsor, but you don't necessarily get a partner user.”

Why legal engineers made the difference

Legora's legal engineers were embedded into the firm for close to a month, in their offices three or four days a week, running training, drop-ins, and informal one-to-ones.

“Legora really understood that a big piece of coming into a law firm is the human element and helping lawyers adopt and learn the tech,” says Kris. “And yes, we’re fortunate to have very strong training and change teams internally who really helped us. But having that additional resource from Legora that knew the product inside out was game changing for us.”

Kris explains how this meant trust was established straight away. “A banking legal engineer will be able to speak to a banking lawyer at Linklaters,” he says. “They'll know the contracts, they'll know the processes. Whereas if you're speaking to someone who's not a lawyer, you might have to explain what a document is and why it matters.” That meant sessions could stay focused entirely on the product, not on the underlying legal work.

Legal engineering has stayed part of how the two teams work together since. “If there's something we're stuck on with a practice group, we can send that use case through to them,” Kris says. “We don't need to share the documents, because they're confidential, but we can say, ‘how have you tackled this before?’ It's almost like an external resource we can plug in to help.”

That external support was matched by an internal one. Linklaters built its own partner-specific materials, walking each partner through how they can “leverage the different functionalities within Legora,” in Sarah's words, with a clear message: “you own this.” When the firm's own internal AI lawyer team stood up that November, each person went around, sat next to individual partners, and answered their questions directly, both to build a relationship and to make themselves a resource partners knew they could call on.

Legora Agent, and the shift it created

Before the Agent, using Legora to its full potential meant knowing which of its tools to reach for: Tabular Review, Editor, Monitors, Lists. “That's a lot to hold in your head,” explains Kris, “especially for a lawyer on a deal at 2am that closes the next day.”

The Agent removed that complexity. Instead of picking a tool, the lawyer describes the goal in plain language, and the Agent works out which parts of Legora it needs, pulls them together, and gets on with the job itself. This is a big shift, from Legora assisting lawyers, to Legora executing complex end-to-end tasks, with the lawyer supervising its work.

For partners, it matches a way of working they already know. “Partners are used to setting a goal and handing it to a matter team,” Kris says. “That's exactly how you work with the Agent. You give it your goal, and it distributes the work.”

Sarah adds that the Agent's arrival landed at the right moment because of the trust Legora had already built. “It meets partners where they are, and they don't have to adopt new behavior. But that adoption depended on the months of credibility we'd already built with the product. We rolled out everything on a big bang basis as opposed to a graduated basis, because we felt confident that people were ready to make that leap.”

“We've seen a complete sea change between when we enabled the Agent,” says Tom. “Pretty much everyone has switched. So you can see on those adoption charts, people move straight onto the Agent because they recognize immediately the power and the capability that it brings. That's really changed how our lawyers interact, and enabled us to do those much more complex tasks much more readily, because we don't need to spend a huge amount of time breaking the task down and working out how we need the tool to achieve the best result.”

Legora Agent, in practice

The clearest example of what changed in practice comes from Tom’s field; he’s also a partner in the firm's structured finance team, where he has spent years helping clients buy and sell portfolios of receivables and finance.

He explains how a security review, which checks an investor’s rights and position on an existing deal, traditionally moved in one direction: a junior associate drafts the first pass, a managing associate reviews it, and a partner signs off before it reaches the client. “Legora Agent has turned that workflow around,” Tom says. “The partner can now run an initial review of the documents and get key red flags early. Within a short time of taking on the review, they can call the client and give an initial steer, while the full human review continues in the background.”

The partner then hands that steer back to the team with clear direction on where to dig deeper, and the team uses the Agent again to expand and check the analysis. “It's actually the opportunity to rethink how we delegate the work, how we offer something to the client which is different in terms of experience from the way that we've done it before, something that's of greater value,” Tom says.

“There are lots of examples where you see a sort of efficiency gain,” adds Sarah. “But a discrete task like this is probably one of the clearer examples to point to.”

That shift is possible because the Agent can hold an entire complex transaction in view at once, rather than forcing lawyers to break it into pieces. “Take a complex financing transaction: multiple jurisdictions, multiple security documents, creditors with bonds, loans, and swaps,” Tom says. “Before, you could only put one or two documents in at a time, and you spent real time working out how to break the task down. Now the question has changed from ‘how do I write a good prompt’ to ‘what context does the agent need to do this job’. And if it needs more, it asks.”

Another example comes up on deals with many counterparties rather than one client. In a syndicated transaction, where numerous lenders or investors each hold their own position on the same document, the Agent can line up all of that data at once and flag where one party's position on a clause differs from another's. “That whole piece becomes a much simpler exercise for an individual to set up and review themselves, rather than going through multiple rounds of editing with different parties involved,” Tom says.

The strongest product adoption the firm has seen

“I don't think the tech team has ever had a product that's landed that well within the business, where they're just coming to us and saying, ‘we love this so much, it's changing how we work’,” Kris says.

“Since deployment, if you add up everyone's hours on the platform, the firm has spent over 35 years on Legora. That's a huge number on its own. But it's also the small things; colleagues in the tech team tell me someone mentioned in a call how great Legora is.”

“If we look at the data across the entire business, we've got fairly consistent adoption across every practice group, which is encouraging, because it indicates that each practice group is finding its own ways to leverage the Agent to deliver value to the group,” Tom adds.

Leveraging proprietary data and Legora’s impact on clients

“For law firms to differentiate themselves in this new world,” Tom says, “a big part of it is access to data and being able to leverage our data. One of the things that we've seen, in particular with more junior users, is that by creating organizational databases of key documents on Legora, we've been able to put that information at their fingertips. So in some cases, a junior lawyer can replicate the experience that a more senior lawyer would traditionally come to bear on a transaction just by having that information to hand.”

“So, for example,” he says, “questions we often get asked by clients are ‘is this term or market? Is it consistent with what you've seen on similar transactions before?’ Pre Legora, you would be dependent as a partner on what you can recall of the last few transactions that you've done. You might look at your records for those transactions and that data set. But having that information in a centralized format that the Agent can query on behalf of the lawyer means that even in the course of a single phone call with the client, all of that information about the whole firm's experience of working on those types of transactions is available. And I think that really impresses clients.”

“The quality of work comes from us as Linklaters,” Kris reiterates. He notes how this comes back to what Legora’s CEO, Max, understood in early conversations “which is we own the data, it's ours because that's our differentiator. That's what makes us Linklaters. [Max] didn't want to interfere with that, and he didn't want the platform to get in the way of that. He just wanted the platform to surface it, so we quality control it through the data that goes in, and then our review processes, which, yes, Legora helps.”

“But I think that's probably Legora's best green flags,” Kris continues, “it's actually a bit of a Swiss army knife. It's the platform that you then plug your own data or own processes into and it just amplifies those.”

The platform also impacts how clients experience the work, particularly in how quickly the firm can respond. “I think a lot of those scenarios are about speed of response and responsiveness,” Tom says. “Because that's where you see a light bulb moment with clients, where they can realize that we can do things that we haven't been able to do before.”

“Ultimately, we're a client business,” Tom says, “so really everything that we do should be about delivering higher quality for our clients, and I think we're really aligned on that, and that's why we're really excited to continue to work with Max and the rest of the team. And it really is a relationship that operates at all levels.”

He explains how he and Sarah meet with Legora regularly to talk about their longer term vision, the roadmap and the new feature rollouts. “That depth of relationship is really exciting,” he says.

A partnership that keeps growing

When Sarah initially met with a range of vendors, she asked each one the same question: how are you measuring ROI? Most hadn't really started thinking about it, or hadn't said so publicly. Legora's answer stood out. “That's such an exciting question, we're really looking forward to exploring that with you,” they told her.

For Sarah, this was an early signal of the kind of relationship Linklaters and Legora could foster: “They recognized this was going to be important, it mattered to me, and therefore they wanted to explore that with us.”

She's seen that pattern hold since, in a number of different ways, and it convinced her early on that Legora would treat Linklaters as an equal partner rather than just a customer. More broadly, the exchange suggested to her that “this was a relationship that would grow with us and that we would be able to say we want to look at specific things and have equals and partners looking at it with us.”

Together, Legora and Linklaters have fostered a genuine design partnership in which Linklaters helps shape what comes next. That dynamic carries through today in Skills, Legora's next major feature. Linklaters has early access to Skills, and the test group is deliberately senior: roughly half partners, half AI lawyers, most already familiar with what Skills are and how they work.

“Our knowledge is our differentiator,” Tom reiterates. “Skills are a way to plug that knowledge into the Agent, so it does the job the way we would expect a Linklaters lawyer to do it, right from the first attempt.”

The collaboration runs through a shared Slack channel with Legora and Linklaters teams in the same conversation, sharing live feedback. “Legora has clearly learned from our view on the ground,” he says, “and we've learned a lot from how they weigh those trade-offs.”

For Kris, this design partnership is central to why Linklaters stays with Legora: “It's one of the main reasons we stay. Without it, other vendors would have an opening. With it, Legora stays front of mind.”

What this means for the future generation of lawyers

Tom's thoughts on where all this leads came from a recent visitor: a vacation scheme student, still at university, deciding which firm to join.

“Because he had Legora, the lawyers he worked with could give him much more complex tasks than they normally would give someone with no transactional experience,” Tom says. “He used Agent to understand what he was being asked to do, get some output, check it against the underlying documents, and question the conclusions further. Those are steps we would expect from a newly qualified lawyer, and he was a work experience student.”

“As you spend more time understanding the more complex concepts and the decision-making process and the judgment,” says Tom, “and you're doing less of the sort of churny work, there are more opportunities to think about what else this touches on. Where in the continuum of the client relationship am I sitting? And can I develop skills sort of laterally in order to understand or help deliver?”

This also speaks directly to a question the firm's strategy team has thought hard about: whether AI removes the opportunities junior lawyers need in order to learn. “One of the real questions that we grapple with from a strategy perspective is ‘how are we displacing opportunities for lawyers of the future to learn by using this technology?’” Tom says.

“Actually, I think this was a great example where it's really the opposite. People can do things earlier, they can engage with complex work more quickly than they otherwise would, and they can get a lot more out of it. We just need to train them to use it in the right way. That makes me feel positive about the future.”