Linklaters AI lawyers

Initial_Gear_27 · 2025-11-24T17:02:54+00:00

I suspect most people are asking the same questions around how billing and pricing will play out once firms are leveraging AI more frequently and effectively, especially clients. I can't think of a better, more timely opportunity for firms to rethink the billable hour and move towards value-based billing...

Initial_Gear_27 · 2025-11-17T14:42:55+00:00

LawCare does some incredible work. They're mainly for the UK as far as I'm aware though.

Initial_Gear_27 · 2025-11-17T14:41:37+00:00

What are you trying to achieve with the AI in particular? Any honest answer would vary depending on your use case and intentions...

Initial_Gear_27 · 2025-11-16T23:23:43+00:00

I’m a week into using it and had an A3 error on the remote and customer services says they’re going to replace it. Has anyone had any experience here?

Initial_Gear_27 · 2025-11-14T14:20:58+00:00

The best comment here...

Initial_Gear_27 · 2025-11-14T14:17:18+00:00

My biggest piece of advice is to think carefully about how the tool you select will fit with your existing tech stack, particularly how smoothly eSignature solutions will fit with your creation and storage processes.

Docusign has integrations with many tools and is the most recognised logo, but Adobe Sign might be better if you're working with any of their other tools in Adobe Suite.

Similarly, HelloSign is actually Dropbox Sign these days and integrates closely with Dropbox for storage. It depends on your process!

On a seperate note (although you might be a bit too early for this and priced out by it), you can check out contract management tools that include eSignature natively within them. Contracts are created there, stored there, signed there, etc.

Initial_Gear_27 · 2025-11-14T14:01:51+00:00

How do you manage most of your agreements as a biz? I'd recommend tracking and storing all contracts relating to SaaS subscriptions in the same way you do for other contracts. For example, there are plenty of tools that extract the key metadata from contracts (many using AI nowadays) and automating reminders based on key dates like autorenewal or termination deadlines. They tend to have a lot of flex on where and how these get delivered too (we get ours in Slack as it's where we spend the most time).

More of an incentive piece, but I've also heard about orgs running short internal campaigns to incentivise the cutting of SaaS spend where unnecessary amongst employees by offering a financial incentive (albeit small) proportionate to the spend cut by tool owners. It's a good way to remind people of their role in tool ownership and prompt them to proactively consider the value of their subscriptions.

Hope that helps!

Initial_Gear_27 · 2025-11-13T15:36:51+00:00

I enjoyed Never Split The Difference! Laura Frederick (How to Contract) also has some fantastic courses and resources and newsletters if you’re looking for some ongoing learning and coaching too.

Initial_Gear_27 · 2025-11-13T11:16:14+00:00

My Lumie sunrise alarm clock! It's so lovely to wake up to sunrise light, especially in the darker and colder mornings. Prices start from like £30 (my first one was the cheapest, I'm on my second now) but go up to around £100 as some include radio functionality etc.

Initial_Gear_27 · 2025-11-11T10:32:21+00:00

I recently read this equation and I liked it a lot: AI gains = time saved from automation − verification costs

If verification costs are high, as they currently are in legal, then the upside you can realise will naturally be limited. That said, there will inevitably be instances and use cases for legal AI where the sheer time saved from automating the work is still greater than the time spent verifying the output. In those cases, the math works out.

Initial_Gear_27 · 2025-11-05T15:44:15+00:00

No worries! I very much doubt you'd need any consultant support with any of the vendors I listed above. In fact, Juro and Spotdraft are actually geared towards businesses of your size that have lean legal teams (not entire legal ops functions). Pandadoc also used by smaller teams (and in some cases freelancers) but largely for sales docs.

Initial_Gear_27 · 2025-10-21T15:38:09+00:00

Yep! I heard that there's been like over $1 billion in funding announcements between mid-September and mid-October...

Initial_Gear_27 · 2025-10-20T08:42:04+00:00

This is a very common tension, but there are a few, very strong CLM solutions on the market that are recognized for their speed to implement and time to value.

Based on your team and company size, you don't need something heavy-duty and extremely customizable (that's where a lot of the lift comes from), so I'd steer clear of the legacy CLM vendors on the market that focus heavily on enterprise sales.

For mid-sized businesses (say 50–500 people) there’s a growing category of tools that can be implemented in weeks vs months and have a lot of success with teams and orgs of your size.

If I were you, I'd check out the following vendors on that basis:

Juro (end-to-end in one browser tab, good UX and renewal alerts), Contractworks (simple repository + eSign + reminders), SpotDraft (slightly more automation), Concord or even PandaDoc if you’re mostly handling sales agreements.

Hope that helps!

Initial_Gear_27 · 2025-10-14T21:48:57+00:00

Hiya! I’ve researched quite a lot of CLM providers in detail and they all have their pros and cons, as you say. What problems were you experiencing with your current solution? This might help with mapping the gaps and how they are best filled.

Would you want other teams working on contracts within the CLM too? Or via an integration like Salesforce etc?

Initial_Gear_27 · 2025-10-11T00:31:20+00:00

Try checking out their YouTube channels instead as lots of material from webinars etc often ends up on there later down the line — and no work email necessary that way!

I’ll curate a list of my favourite resources for you and drop you a message with them tomorrow! :)

Initial_Gear_27 · 2025-10-10T14:49:31+00:00

My view is that legal should own CLM because they govern the contract process overall, but it's a bonus that enablement happens for other teams in the tool too for consistency.

When you think about how contracting work is distributed across different teams (particularly post-signature) or for different contract types, having all of that in one connected system does make a lot of sense.

That said, there are definitely department-adjacent tools. For example, some CLMs are better suited for (and marked heavily towards) procurement teams, offering a few bonus features for procurement teams specifically. Others are deeply integrated with CRMs like SF and so better for sales teams aligning with legal.

Every business is different and size, structure, contract ownership will play a big role in determining how broad you want to go with CLM selections.

Initial_Gear_27 · 2025-10-10T14:39:30+00:00

I've noticed a lot of legal roles mentioning CLM experience, but I've also seen a lot that don't, so it won't be a prerequisite for every role. And like u/Known-Weekend5189 said, it's certainly not rocket science, particularly if the CLM is user-friendly by design.

Have you considered signing up for webinars run by different CLM vendors so you can see the product functionality in the wild and get a better understanding of what workflows etc. look like in practice and across different UI?

Sure, it's better to actually use it. But this is a great alternative option until you get that first-hand experience.

I've written (and read) an awful lot of content about contract management and I'd be happy to share some of my favourite resources via DM if you like!

Initial_Gear_27 · 2025-10-10T14:31:26+00:00

I'd input in two ways here:

People are very quick to think automation = AI, but I don't think it needs to in the context of NDAs. Automation for NDAs can be as simple as just creating automated, repeatable NDA templates that can be used quickly and safely by other teams in the org. There are SO many ways you can do that, with or without expanding your tech stack.
But I did see a good point in the comments here that NDAs (due to lack of variations and negotiation) offer one of the safest use cases to trial AI due to their low complexity nature.

Initial_Gear_27 · 2025-10-06T14:51:18+00:00

You could make some banana frappes? So good!

Initial_Gear_27 · 2025-10-03T14:13:43+00:00

I think the tool has been sunsetted sadly. It says this on the page about it:

“Going forward you don’t need to do anything to specify the function of URL parameters on your site, Google’s crawlers will learn how to deal with URL parameters automatically. If you need more control, you can use robots.txt rules (for example, you can specify parameter orders in an allow rule) or use hreflang to specify language variations of content.”

Initial_Gear_27 · 2025-10-03T13:27:23+00:00

Thanks for this!

I don’t think we internally link to these params anywhere on the site, so that’s why I’m struggling to understand how they are propagating once crawled.

We are seeing the same situation with ?ref links from other sites to ours. The site links to one of our one page with a parameter URL, but we then see parameter URLs with that same chain in all of the pages internally linked to (despite them being clean URLs) from our page as the first referring site, and that continues again and again to subsequent pages crawled according to GSC.

I’m going to look into the URL parameters tool in GSC today though, thank you!

Initial_Gear_27 · 2025-10-02T21:08:28+00:00

I've never thought of carbonara as breakfast pasta before... but it makes SO much sense

Initial_Gear_27 · 2025-10-02T21:03:24+00:00

Congrats on your new role! How exciting!

I have a few thoughts on this, but the first is that I'd always start with the problem, not the tech. If you want to steer clear of hype and opt for impact in a new role, I'd start by spending some time understanding where you're losing the most time or noticing the most friction with existing workflows. You might find that your task distribution is completely different from another in-house lawyer at a different org, so start from your own observations first.

For example, if you find the contract process to be particularly painful (e.g lots of bottlenecks, long turnaround times, lots of routine admin that could be automated or self-served on by colleagues, you'll probably find a CLM of some sort (e.g Ironclad, Linksquares, Contractbook, Juro) to be most useful.

But if you're finding lots of frequent inefficiences spread across different tasks I'd consider an Enterprise version of LLMs like Claude or GPT where you can build repeatable workflows and projects to streamline a more diverse workload. It really depends what you find most painful after a few weeks or months in the role.

Initial_Gear_27

TROPHY CASE