A&O Shearman, the Anglo-American law firm, said on 5 November that it will commit USD1.1bn to AI over five years. The firm says most of that value is lawyers’ time rather than new technology spending: each practice will spend at least 3% of its time building specialist AI tools and services for its area of law.
The firm also published usage figures. It says 96% of its partners and 93% of its lawyers used its AI tools in September 2026, and that more than 558,000 activities were recorded on its ContractMatrix and Harvey workflow tools that month. Client uptake of ContractMatrix, a contract tool the firm built with Microsoft and Harvey in 2023 and now sells to in-house legal teams, rose ninefold in a year, it says. All of these figures are the firm’s own.
The firm gave no figures on time saved, cost or quality of work. It says one client’s blind evaluation scored ContractMatrix 8.5% above the next closest rival, but has not published that evaluation.
“This significant investment signals where we intend to take the firm over the next decade,” said Hervé Ekué, the firm’s global managing partner.
The pledge follows a US survey in October in which most in-house lawyers said AI is cutting the work they send to outside firms.
Source: A&O Shearman