Law firms stop piloting AI and start rolling it out to everyone
Jones Day takes Legora to 2,500 lawyers across 40 offices, Linklaters reports 70% monthly adoption of its Agent, and a 17-person injury firm cuts medical review to 15 minutes. Legal AI's conversation has moved from pilots to standards.
- Jones Day entered a strategic partnership with Legora and will roll the platform out to 2,500 lawyers across 40 offices, pairing it with an AI learning and development program led with King's College London's Professor Dan Hunter. Self-reported m:…4149
- Legora says Linklaters reached 70% monthly adoption of its Agent, with 97% of weekly active users working in the Agent within a month of rollout and monthly active partners rising from 65% to almost 80%. Self-reported m:…8320
- Littler partnered with Legora and Epiq to help employers with AI-enabled workforce transformation; Legora says its platform is used by more than 140,000 legal professionals at over 2,000 law firms and in-house teams. Self-reported m:…6256
- In an EvenUp-published case study, a 17-person St. Louis injury firm says medical record reviews fell from a couple of hours to 15 minutes, and reports higher initial offers from insurers. Self-reported m:…2766
The week the pilots ended
Jones Day has made its pick. The firm entered a strategic partnership with Legora and will roll the platform out firm-wide to 2,500 lawyers across 40 offices in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. The deal includes co-designing a new ontological legal research product and launching an AI learning and development program with Professor Dan Hunter of King's College London. m:…4149
Linklaters, meanwhile, published its adoption numbers — and they read like a mandate achieved. Legora says the firm's monthly adoption of the Agent stands at 70%, with 97% of weekly active users working in the Agent within a month of rollout. Monthly active partners rose from 65% to almost 80%, firm-wide weekly active use rose almost 15%, and the user base expanded about 20% during the rollout. m:…8320
How they got the lawyers to use it
The adoption story is the interesting one. Linklaters ran an enhanced proof of concept across five practice groups ahead of its global partner conference, then launched the Agent firm-wide days after the conference. Sarah Barnard built a group of twelve partners to lead peer training, and Legora embedded legal engineers into practice groups for close to a month. Barnard's explanation of why it worked: "It meets partners where they are, and they don't have to adopt new behavior." m:…8320
The product shift matters too: the Agent lets lawyers describe goals in plain language rather than selecting specific tools, and can hold an entire complex transaction in view at once. Linklaters has also founded Applied Intelligence, a practice group combining data scientists and lawyers. m:…8320
The employer-side play
The mandate pattern is spreading beyond the firms themselves. Littler — which employs more than 2,000 labor and employment attorneys globally — entered strategic partnerships with Legora and Epiq to help employers with AI-enabled workforce transformation. The model is deliberately flexible rather than prescribing a single platform: Legora partners on the design, build, and implementation of AI-enabled legal workflows, while Epiq brings process and workflow redesign, data readiness, governance, privacy, technology implementation, training, and organizational change. Littler leads the employment-law and workforce-governance side. m:…6256
The scale argument underneath it all: Legora says its platform is now used by more than 140,000 legal professionals at over 2,000 law firms and in-house teams. When a vendor can point to that installed base plus firm-wide rollouts at Jones Day and Linklaters, the sales conversation changes from 'should we pilot this' to 'what's our standard.' m:…6256
The 17-person proof
The mandate story is not only for global firms. In a case study published by EvenUp, a 17-person St. Louis trial firm says medical record reviews fell from a couple of hours to 15 minutes, with a visual medical chronology that lets attorney John Moffitt familiarize himself with years of treatment in that time. Draft demand letters arrive in about 30 minutes — complex ones previously took 20 to 30 hours of review — and attorney Alyson Dunavant reports the firm is seeing higher initial offers from insurers: With EvenUp, the firm says it is getting initial offers that are healthier and higher. m:…2766
The firm is now piloting AI communication agents for opening claim calls with adjusters, while attorneys review and finalize every demand letter. The implication for the rest of the profession: the firms that treated AI as a pilot ran one experiment; the firms treating it as a standard are redesigning how work gets done — from 2,500-lawyer rollouts to 17-person shops. m:…2766
What is still unresolved
- Long-term impact of agentic workflows on junior lawyer skill development
- Launch date for the ontological legal research product Jones Day and Legora plan to co-design
- Whether the single-firm EvenUp results generalize across other personal-injury practices
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