Reed Smith Names AI Chief, Plans for Faster Deals and IP Work

Richard Robbins is about a week into his role as Reed Smith’s first director of applied artificial intelligence, but—in a sign of how quickly the area is developing—there’s already a lot on his plate.

The law firm is working on at least eight generative artificial intelligence projects, ranging from testing new products to developing AI-fueled workflows for entire practice areas. Robbins, who joined the firm from legal tech company Epiq, will help usher those projects from the test phase to broader rollouts.

“It has been everybody’s part-time work, but we knew that this is so serious,” David Cunningham, Reed Smith’s chief innovation officer, said in an interview. “Just like we have heads of our data insights, our product design team, and our lab, we really needed to have an equal if not greater focus on how we apply AI and data science to the firm.”

David Cunningham

Reed Smith

Law firms have been trying to develop strategies for how to invest in AI and where to deploy it to make their work more efficient. Reed Smith’s approach will pair the Chicago-based Robbins and other tech experts with practice groups to help create new workflows and pricing strategies, Cunningham said.

The firm is looking for areas that can benefit from the advantages Cunningham said AI can offer, such as closing deals more quickly or lowering the cost of delivering legal services. Two practice groups that can benefit from more speedy work include M&A and intellectual property transactions, he said.

It’s a relatively rare, thoughtful approach, compared with many firms that are pursuing AI adoption in “random spaces,” said Toby Brown, a former chief practice management officer at Perkins Coie who now consults for law firms on AI and strategy. Brown does not consult for Reed Smith.

Firms should develop AI models in practices where they are already strong and that are worth the high cost of today’s technologies, Brown said. Developing an AI-fueled practice is expensive and could lower a firm’s revenue in the short-term, because it will make it more efficient, he said.

That could be an unwelcome setback for a practice that doesn’t bring in work. But in a practice where a firm has a well-known brand, it can provide a defensible competitive advantage to win more work from competitor firms, Brown said.

“You need to think big and hard about where you’re writing the big checks,” he said.

Repricing the Work

Reed Smith was the country’s 34th largest law firm by revenue last year, bringing in $1.4 billion, according to data compiled by the American Lawyer. The 1,500-lawyer firm has been known in recent years for investing in technology and new legal service delivery methods, including spinning out a tech-focused managed services business, Gravity Stack, in 2018.

Reed Smith’s current AI projects involve testing commercial products including Harvey, CoPilot, and a new product from legal technology company Litera, Cunningham said.

The firm is an alpha tester of Harvey, the legal-focused generative AI company that received a $5 million investment from ChatGPT creator OpenAI. Currently, Reed Smith has 130 users of the tool, Cunningham said.

The firm’s most popular use of Harvey early on has been its ability to summarize large documents, Cunningham said. Users have reported it generally lets them research a wider swathe of issues in less time, allowing for a more complete review of legal work, he said.

“We talk to clients about that,” Cunningham said. “For the same price you always pay for these matters, we can go a few steps further on some of these issues. So, it’s completeness and thoroughness.”

Reed Smith is also hiring in its data science, project management, and innovation lab units. Those employees will help the firm as it identifies practices to develop new AI-driven workflows, said Cunningham, who is based in Houston.

“We are explicitly going around the firm to find places where moving faster, doing a more thorough job, or lowering the cost of doing it are really the most helpful things,” he said. “And sometimes we have to reprice the work accordingly.”

On the pricing front, Cunningham said some clients may be willing to pay more for closing deals more quickly, or the firm could price its services lower based on a higher volume of work that AI lets the firm handle more efficiently.

New Hire

Robbins brings a computer science background with a long track record in the legal industry. He served as Epiq’s director of applied artificial intelligence for about a year before joining the firm. The former Sidley Austin partner, who worked as its director of knowledge management, also was previously general counsel of investment firm Morningstar.

Richard Robbins

Reed Smith

Before earning his J.D. at University of Chicago Law School, Robbins was a software engineer and holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He’s also completing a master’s degree in data science this month from University of California at Berkeley.

Robbins said he’s been working with artificial intelligence since the 1980s, but generative AI represented a step-change in what the technology can do for lawyers since it can analyze concepts rather than just words. Reed Smith under Cunningham’s leadership is focused on delivering AI to “deliver the results our clients expect,” Robbins said.

“When many organizations are just starting to figure it out, this team has been very thoughtfully assessing an array of alternatives and putting things in flight,” he said. “This is not happening by accident. Everything that’s being done is aligned to the mission of the firm.”