A&O Shearman values AI commitment at $1.1 billion, mostly in lawyer time

A&O Shearman has committed $1.1 billion over five years to its artificial intelligence strategy. Most of the stated value comes from lawyer time rather than a cash technology outlay. In its announcement of the program, the firm said every legal practice must devote at least 3% of its time to developing specialist AI tools and services for its area of law.

That structure makes the headline figure a firm-assigned value for a combined work and technology program. It is not a disclosure that A&O Shearman will spend $1.1 billion in cash on software, infrastructure or vendors. The program also puts a firmwide time mandate behind legal AI adoption, rather than limiting the effort to product procurement.

The firm said lawyer time represents the majority of the commitment. It has not disclosed how it valued that time, the size of the cash portion or how technology funding will be divided among products, vendors and other costs.

A&O Shearman said its approach brings legal specialists together with data scientists and developers to create tools for specific areas of law. Its ContractMatrix product suite was developed with Microsoft and legal AI company Harvey. The firm said it is delivering the software to clients across several jurisdictions, in some cases using new pricing structures.

The firm also reported increased use of its existing AI products. It said client uptake across ContractMatrix rose ninefold over the preceding 12 months. In September, 96% of its partners and 93% of its lawyers used its AI tools, generating more than 558,000 activities across ContractMatrix and Harvey workflow products. Those are company-reported metrics; the opened evidence did not include an independent audit or underlying dataset.

A&O Shearman said a qualified lawyer remains responsible for the firm’s advice regardless of AI’s role in producing it. The firm said its AI governance committees oversee deployments across practices, sectors and offices.