VWV puts its most junior lawyers in charge of shaping the firm’s AI strategy
The secret to making AI work is to get people trained and enthused.
Law is one of the most tightly regulated industries, yet it is seeing some of the fastest rates of AI adoption.
According to PwC’s latest annual law firm survey, almost 90 per cent of the top 100 UK firms have now implemented or trialled generative AI tools, up from 55 per cent in 2023.
VWV, a mid-sized firm based in Bristol, stands out for its unique approach — putting trainee solicitors at the centre of forming and implementing its firm-wide AI strategy.
VWV was founded in 1815 and employs 500 people across offices in Bristol, London, Birmingham and Watford. It first started investing in AI research and development in 2020, after managing partner Steve McGuigan spent lockdown days online exploring how AI could be used to develop bespoke time-saving products for legal tasks. VWV has since spent about £250,000 on AI-specific technology, and launched partnerships with the lawtech start-up, Robin AI, and the Technology in Professional Services programme.
VWV lawyers are offered prompt engineering training, and use external tools to drive efficiencies including streamlining contract review by 80 per cent. The firm has also built custom software to manage its data interactions with large language models (LLMs).
In early 2024, 23 trainees were split into teams and tasked with finding problems that could be solved using AI. While rotating through different departments, the trainees came up with 50 problem areas and ideas for solutions, which Dave and his team helped narrow down to create seven “proof-of-concept” projects, which are now being piloted. The programme involved trainees pitching their ideas to senior partners, and becoming colleagues’ go-to for support using AI products.
"Successful ideas included using AI tools to take attendance notes, which has freed up trainees to participate in client meetings and spend 50 per cent less time on notes. Another idea led to VWV purchasing a tool that drafts reports for commercial property transactions and makes the entire process twice as efficient", Dave said.
Dave Bloor, technology lead, didn’t want the system to rely on a central team.
“We wanted to create an innovation agenda that didn’t just rely on a central team,” he said. “After many musings, we centred around allowing the trainees to be at the forefront of rethinking how we deliver our legal services. Their minds are the freshest around AI, and there’s a lot of support among our senior leadership for trainees bringing that fresh thinking into how teams have worked for a long time… [Through the programme], we have ‘change agents’ ready.”
Zac Martin-Taylor, 28, a trainee, said the programme made him feel he was “actually contributing something of value”. While fellow trainee, Claire Hui Bon Hoa, 31, said that despite initially being “very cynical” about the initiative, she now believes AI genuinely can allow lawyers to “spend more time being creative”.
VWV plans to repeat the programme, and McGuigan hopes it will help attract top recruits through offering a chance to develop future-proofing skills.
He is also clear that AI will enhance, rather than replace, junior lawyer roles in future. “Working alongside AI is a better way to think of it than: ‘we’ve got a person-shaped hole in the team, and we’re trying to fill it with an AI’. That will never work. So we have to reimagine the way we work,” he said.
McGuigan advised any law firms just getting started with AI against repeating an early mistake made at VWV — not investing heavily in engagement before purchasing tools.
He said: “We got lots of licences for a product and trialled it and didn’t get good results, and that was because we’d jumped a critical step, which was getting people trained and interested and enthused, and making [AI adoption] part of the culture”.
The team is also optimistic that effective deployment of AI can help “level the playing field” and allow mid-size firms like VWV to compete with larger players.
McGuigan said: “When I started the process of thinking about AI in 2019, I worried that the firms that would win in adopting AI would be ones with huge budgets and huge amounts of data and know-how, and that they could leverage these in a way that smaller firms wouldn’t be able to. But I think the good thing for all law firms… is that the best tools are LLMs and they’re widely available very cheaply… so success will be more to do with driving a culture that embraces AI.”
Originally published by Naomi Ackerman at The Times