Russell Kennedy
Law firm
EMEA
Customer
Russell Kennedy
joined legora
Russell Kennedy is an Australian law firm with a 150-year heritage and more than 300 people across offices in Melbourne and Sydney. It advises businesses, government and the community sector on corporate and commercial matters, disputes, property, workplace relations, privacy and more, and is a member of the international legal network Ally Law.
Building on its culture of experimentation, Russell Kennedy took a novel approach to its roll out of Legora. It built a supported onboarding program and a network of internal Legora Champions on a simple principle: lawyers understand their own work better than anyone else, so they are best placed to teach each other.
The result has impacted how the firm learns, as well as how it works. “I think it's democratized learning,” says CJ Warburton, Manager of Digital Solutions at Russell Kennedy.
CJ is part of the digital team responsible for the firm's legal technology, business applications, automation and data. His job is to find technology that improves how lawyers and business services teams work, and to make sure it delivers real value. He joined Russell Kennedy just over a year ago, after working through the same AI journey at other firms.
Alongside him is Gina Tresidder, a Partner in Russell Kennedy's Corporate and Commercial team, specializing in privacy, data protection, IT and IP. She was one of the firm's first Legora Champions.
Together, they've built a model that's reshaping how Russell Kennedy learns and works.
The Impacts so far
Since the firm-wide rollout in July, Russell Kennedy’s Legora license base has more than doubled, from 31 to 67 users. Weekly active use has grown faster still, up 126% over the same period.
Weekly active partners rose from 50% to 64% of the partner base, with 86% active in September.
Twelve of the firm’s thirteen practice groups now record weekly Agent adoption of 60% or higher.
A pilot built on peer learning
Russell Kennedy first tried Legora through a pilot organized by Ally Law, the international network of law firms it belongs to. That meant the firm was testing the platform alongside firms in other countries.
“It was a really enjoyable way to start, because you felt like you weren't alone in it,” says Gina. “You had all these other peers who are not your competitors, because they're law firms in other countries. They're more like your colleagues.”
“When the largest firms run these first experiments and rollouts, there can be a bit of homogeneity in how they think about it,” CJ says. “We had the opportunity to learn from others who weren't competing with us but had different ideas and different challenges.”
That experience set the pattern for what came next; if lawyers learned well from peers in other firms, they would learn even better from peers inside their own firm. This philosophy would later shape Russell Kennedy's own rollout.
The pilot ran for six weeks. CJ had seen longer pilots at larger firms work against the testing, so keeping it short and focused mattered.
“Everyone was really bought in and leaned into the experimentation process. They weren't afraid of failing, that's a very different mindset to how lawyers generally approach technology, which is, ‘I want it to be perfect.’ Instead, we said, it's not going to be perfect, and that's okay. That's the point of experimenting.”
– CJ Warburton, Manager of Digital Solutions, Russell Kennedy
“It was the first AI tool I saw that was so easy to pick up and use by anyone immediately,” says Gina. “You can start using it from day one with very little training, and I think that helped a lot.”
Testing with rigor
Within that shared pilot, Russell Kennedy ran its own tightly structured program. Before testing Legora on a task, participants recorded the hypothesis they were testing. Then they logged what they tried, the steps they took, what worked, what didn't and why, and whether they would recommend it to others.
“It was a very scientific process,” says CJ. The firm turned the results into a board report that showed partners and the board what was tried, what worked, and how it could help each practice.
By the end of the pilot, the decision was easy. A 12-month license gave the firm flexibility. “If we got to the end of 12 months and decided it wasn't working, we had the freedom to move to another product,” says Gina. “But I knew we would stay.”
Putting lawyers in charge of learning
“We learned fairly quickly that enthusiasm alone doesn't drive adoption,” says CJ. “People need a platform that's easy to use and delivers high-quality results. And they need support, both at a foundational level and in their day-to-day work, to understand how to use the tool for the activities they actually do.”
CJ had also seen the limits of the traditional approach at other firms. “IT might not have the business lens,” he says. “Each practice group does a different area of law, and the activities under that are very different. A generic approach loses that nuance.”
Time was the other barrier. “The idea of learning something new can be overwhelming to someone who's already really busy,” says Gina. “You have to get over that hump.”
So for the firm-wide rollout, Russell Kennedy flipped the script. Instead of IT leading the training, the firm put its own lawyers at the center, so colleagues learned from people who knew their practice areas and understood their work.
“The lawyer's lens on the problem and the solution, instead of coming to IT, was fundamental in getting this right,” says CJ. “It was the connection between the tool, what you can use it for, how we work and what we need. That connection made the new ways of working happen.”
The digital team handled logistics with Legora, but it didn't write the training content. That came from Legora's team of legal experts, working with Russell Kennedy lawyers who understood the firm's practice areas. Those lawyers were the pilot users, now re-formed as Legora Champions and embedded in their practice groups as the first port of call for colleagues. The network started with 11 Champions and grew to around 16 during the rollout.
The 12-week onboarding program alternated between one week of instructor-led learning and one week of participant-led Q&A. CJ calls the support from Legora “phenomenal.” “There was no pressure, there was no push, but there was incredible support,” he says. “We're now post-rollout, and we still have that level of support.”
Legora also helped Russell Kennedy interpret its usage data, showing the firm what was working and where there was room to improve. The firm then designed targeted training around those findings, and learned from individuals who were getting the most out of niche features.
How ideas spread
Once the Champions were in place, the next challenge was getting ideas to travel between teams.
Legora's Sydney-based team traveled to Melbourne to run a day of sessions at the firm, including a session just for partners to ask about AI, value-based pricing and risk. The afternoon Lab session was the highlight. “That was golden,” says CJ. “It was an explosion of cross-collaboration.”
Gina spent it moving between tables, asking other practice groups what they were doing. That's how she learned Legora can turn a document full of deadlines into calendar reminders. “A lot of us just think in terms of producing a document or an email, but there are all sorts of other things you can do with it,” she says.
Back in Corporate and Commercial, she set up a system to keep ideas moving. Legora users meet monthly to share what they've found, and the full team meeting has a standing slot for a live demo. Afterwards, colleagues without a license bring their own ideas to those who have one. Other practice groups have since adopted the format.
“If ideas just sit in a library, no one will use them,” says Gina. “It's so much more fun to use a tool that somebody has already shown you how to use, and they're in the office next door.”
The firm also runs a Teams channel where Champions answer questions, and lawyers can build Skills in Legora and share them for others to reuse. Seeing what colleagues build creates its own momentum. “There's a bit of positive peer pressure to up the ante,” says CJ.
And some lawyers are building tools of their own. One lawyer in Gina's team, who has a computer science degree, used Legora to build a simple web page that tells colleagues whether a matter needs more detailed cost disclosure. Colleagues don't need a Legora license to use it, so it's open to the whole firm, and it has shown others what they can build themselves.
The model has also changed the role of the firm's central training team. “It's no longer that we just provide the training,” says CJ. “Now, we organize, we structure, and we set foundations so that you can train each other and support each other.”
The numbers show how far it has reached
Legora in practice
The biggest impact Gina has seen is more time for the parts of the job that matter most: strategic thinking and client relationships. She uses Legora most often in Word, to draft advice and review contracts. If a client has five or six standard positions they want in every contract, Legora flags them during review. “Of course you still have to read the whole contract,” she says, “but it's nice to know those issues are already dealt with.”
She also uses it to check junior lawyers' work for internal consistency, undefined terms, and numbering and cross-references. Recently, a client that doesn't use Legora asked the firm to run a heavily amended 100-page contract through it for exactly that.
It handles admin, too. Gina built a Skill that reads her emails, pulls out the details her legal assistant needs to open a new file, and asks her for anything missing.
The biggest change is where her time goes. “Previously, by the time you finished typing out five pages, it'd be the end of the day and you'd be exhausted,” she says. “Now, if I think, hang on, I've missed the point, I can redraft it very quickly. It lets you spend a lot more time on strategic thinking and all the fun parts of being a lawyer. Really engaging with the client, rather than churning out something generic.”
But the thinking is still hers. “I don't go into Legora and say, I need a draft advice on this, and it appears, perfect,” she says. “I'll say, this client is in this industry, they'll want these key outcomes. Consider privacy, consider AI regulation, consider this particular point. I'm telling it what to do. The ultimate decisions are still made by lawyers.”
The Modern Lawyer
The rollout has also changed how the firm thinks about lawyers' skills; Russell Kennedy had knowledge lawyers, a precedents team, process improvement specialists and digital natives, but no one bridging all of them. Around the same time, CJ's team hired someone with an interest in digital who was also completing her Juris Doctor law degree. The firm saw an opportunity to reshape her role into a legal engineer.
“It seems like the future of law is that modern lawyer,” says CJ. “The legal engineer, the person with that dual lens.”
The firm has also thought carefully about junior lawyers. “From the very start, one of the things we were concerned about was the early career path and what AI might do to it,” says CJ. It's a live question, because juniors are the firm's heaviest users. Associates lead weekly Agent usage at 91%, and senior associates follow at 81% weekly, rising to 95% monthly.
Juniors have always learned by drafting, getting partner feedback and adjusting. So the firm teaches them to recreate that loop. “If AI gives you the output, feed it back in,” says CJ, “and say, ‘Pretend you're the partner I'm reporting to. What feedback would you give me, and why?’”
Gina sees additional benefits. Instructing the tool pushes juniors to think about the big picture from the start.
“You have to think, what are the steps to get to a solution? What's the end game? What legislation do we need to consider? That can help put together a more commercial piece of advice right from the start, which sometimes takes years to master.”
– Gina Tresidder, Partner in Corporate and Commercial team, Russell Kennedy
Gina believes senior lawyers have a responsibility to be creative and deliberate about how they train the next generation. “We'll always need junior lawyers,” she says. “They're the next generation of partners.”
CJ thinks universities have a part to play too. “Firms like Russell Kennedy are leaning into that responsibility,” he says. “The next challenge is for universities to bring more digital training into legal education.”
“I think most of us can see a different way of practicing law.”
Gina Tresidder
Partner
at
Russel Kennedy
