A&O Shearman accelerates AI strategy with a USD1.1 billion lawyer-led commitment

A&O Shearman accelerates AI strategy with a USD1.1 billion lawyer-led commitment
Published Date
Nov 5, 2026
A&O Shearman is accelerating its artificial intelligence (AI) strategy into its next phase, with a commitment of USD1.1bn over five years. The majority of this investment will come from each practice investing at least 3% of its time developing specialist AI tools and services within their area of law. The strategy reflects a firm-wide step change, enabled by AI, in how legal work is designed and delivered to clients and in how the firm trains its people. 
Summary

Five-year program prioritizes domain expertise with focus on systemizing AI modules across practices 

Every practice to invest at least 3% of its time in building specialist AI tools and services for its area of law

Four years of experience shows AI delivers greater client value when embedded with specific practice and sector expertise, rather than deployed as a generic tool

Strategy builds on the firm’s 2022 rollout of generative AI, the first by any law firm globally

The strategy is also the natural extension of A&O Shearman’s first-mover status in legal AI adoption, supported by a rigorous governance structure that ensures clients receive best-in-class security and quality.  

The firm has carefully tested different approaches to AI deployment over four years. That experience shows that AI has the most meaningful impact when teams embed deep product expertise into AI systems that can then be systemized across a particular area of law. This allows premium legal expertise to be delivered more effectively than a single set of generic tools applied uniformly across the firm, and, critically, it delivers better outcomes for clients.

Clients are at the center of A&O Shearman’s AI transformation and the development of new AI services, and the firm is building solutions in collaboration with them. A&O Shearman has already secured a range of substantial engagements in which a team of lawyers, data scientists and developers is delivering ContractMatrix to clients across multiple jurisdictions, often under novel pricing structures. Client uptake of services across the firm’s suite of ContractMatrix products has increased ninefold over the last 12 months, reflecting growing recognition of the value of combining the firm’s legal expertise and judgment with AI. 

Success will be measured by what it delivers for clients: faster access to the firm’s judgment and expertise, less friction in legal and commercial processes, and greater cost efficiency. Beyond this, clients are benefiting from actionable legal data and insights that can inform commercial decisions within their business, alongside services the firm did not previously offer. These are the measures by which A&O Shearman is resetting the standard for what clients can expect from a global law firm.

 

“This significant investment signals where we intend to take the firm over the next decade”

“This significant investment signals where we intend to take the firm over the next decade,” said Hervé Ekué, A&O Shearman's global managing partner. “AI lets us bring an enhanced skillset to our clients’ work”, however complex, on a global scale and in a way that wasn't possible before.  It opens new ways to deliver value and sharpens how we compete. The firm that leads will combine exceptional legal judgment with the speed and scale to apply it consistently, anywhere in the world. We intend to be that firm and that is what this investment accelerates.”

An industry-leading track record

In 2022, A&O Shearman became the first law firm to deploy generative AI enterprise-wide. In 2023, it became the first firm to build an AI-powered contract tool for in-house counsel—ContractMatrix—in collaboration with Microsoft and Harvey. This partnership has enabled more sophisticated and scaled delivery of solutions to clients and opens the potential for law firms to deliver software-first services on a business-to-business basis. For example, the firm has recently launched ContractMatrix Vantage, and, with Harvey, a series of agentic AI tools built in collaborative spaces. These tools are available to corporates, financial institutions, and other law firms.

The firm's advantage lies in the maturity of that deployment. Four years of building governance frameworks, testing use cases, training lawyers and structuring its own knowledge and data have made AI part of how the firm works in every market it operates in. In September 2026, 96% of the firm’s partners and 93% of its lawyers used its AI tools, carrying out over 558,000 activities on its ContractMatrix and Harvey legal workflow tools. It means that clients are served by teams that work with these tools fluently and across a breadth of matters. 

This depth of experience increasingly shows in the results clients see. For example, in one engagement, a leading global financial and investment conglomerate put A&O Shearman’s ContractMatrix system head-to-head with an internal data science team, legal AI specialist systems and foundation model providers. Based on the client’s own blind evaluations, ContractMatrix scored 8.5% higher than the next closest rival. This secured a multi-year mandate for the firm to deliver highly specialized AI legal services.

“AI changes what we can build for clients and how quickly we can do it” 

“AI changes what we can build for clients and how quickly we can do it,” said David Wakeling, global head of AI at A&O Shearman. “We design each solution with the client, embed it with incredibly detailed and specialist proprietary knowledge from our lawyers, adapt it for the client’s risk positions and let the results do the talking. Our approach is open and transparent with clients, inviting them into our tech ecosystem to see the value we are bringing.  We want to have more upfront client conversations about how the work, the relationship and the economics can evolve with AI.”

 

A culture of strong AI governance

Strong governance underpins every part of the firm’s use of AI. A qualified lawyer always takes responsibility for the advice the firm gives, whatever part AI played in producing it, and the firm’s AI governance committees oversee deployment across practices, sectors and offices. A&O Shearman also works with regulators, professional bodies and policymakers on how AI should be used in legal services and more widely across client sectors.  The firm has participated in UK, U.S. and EU efforts to drive economic growth through responsible AI deployment and in experimentation through measures such as regulatory sandboxes, including the UK’s advisory AI Growth Lab for legal services.