Steps to success in AI adoption
Published in Briefing December 23
Mike Walker, chief technology officer at Peppermint, offers a vision of artificial intelligence radically transforming legal professionals’ future working life.
“The legal sector has been on a fascinating journey,” says Peppermint’s chief technology officer Mike Walker. “I’ve had meetings with many firms that vehemently said they’d never migrate to the cloud — only to eventually come round to the idea three years later.”
He hasn’t seen that sort of resistance to artificial intelligence (AI). A year since ChatGPT’s launch in November 2022, Walker says: “There’s been incredible momentum from that catalyst moment such that law firms now have active AI teams — all within a six- to nine-month window.”
Peppermint is no mere bystander in this sea change. A born-in-the-cloud legal software provider built on Microsoft, it delivers a full suite of Software as a Service (SaaS) core legal systems. Its partnership with Microsoft helps to create the “connective tissue” between that tech giant’s estate and the legal user experience — and these days, to train and tailor AI to a legal-specific world of work — with all the built-in governance, security and compliance capabilities of Azure.
Peppermint’s position on AI is one of pioneering responsibly, Walker says. “We all need to take a very deliberate, considered approach to AI — but equally, be mindful of the fact that you’re missing out if you’re not yet using it.”
AI is poised to be “as transformative of society as the internet” and a key aspect of Peppermint’s role, he believes, is now to “evangelise new ways of thinking and behaviours to help law firms navigate this new technological wave” with confidence, clarity and control.
Forging a new path to productivity
He suggests a raft of potential uses — from predicting case workloads and outcomes, to drafting or summarising emails and extracting action items. AI can help you “never to miss a beat, never drop the ball”.
He’s particularly excited about Peppermint’s work on Microsoft Sharepoint Embedded along with SharePoint Premium to automate document processing — extracting, analysing and classifying data from across thousands of documents and transforming it into useful and actionable knowledge for the whole firm.
The power of a large language model (LLM) truly grounded in intent and understanding of a firm’s work (or, on a more granular level, of a person within that firm) can be “mind-blowing” if leveraged effectively, he argues.
“No one wants to repeatedly fill in data forms — lawyers just want to get on with their job. Well, AI can do the work of reading the intent and extracting the knowledge or answers from your content. It might seem like fractions of a penny’s worth of work, but cumulatively it amounts to tremendous value — cyclical, iterative value.”
The future of conversational AI
The next stage of AI, Walker suggests, will be the natural language interaction between IT systems and the business to create an AI assistant “Copilot” as a new user experience for business systems — much more advanced than today’s Alexa or Siri.
“Consider how clever those virtual assistants were in the first place; now imagine them with a world of knowledge grounded with intent and context to the work being produced,” he says. “Commands could be much more conversational, even ambiguous, and they’d still be understood.”
Where a lawyer today might use a string of complex text to surface a particular document— tomorrow, they’d just write (or say): “I’m looking for a document I wrote about three years ago — I think to someone named John, about an aircraft lease.”
AI will then use those kernels of information and intent extracted from the content to connect the dots and return a result that’s not only highly ranked, but very likely the exact document sought. The lawyer could be terse too — “document, three years ago, John, aircrafts” — and it would still work, Walker believes.
This, he envisages, is just a taste of AI’s direction in the coming months and years — an adaptive, personalised legal ‘copilot’ that not only understands but can also anticipate the user’s needs. “It’s going to be a complete game-changer for how people interact with technology.”
Four stages for successful AI adoption
To be nimble to this world of change, Walker adds, the right foundations are crucial. He outlines four stages for successful adoption of AI:
Define a vision and identify how AI might be used in the firm. Whether that’s broadly aspirational or honed down to specific uses, the point is to establish expectations. Ask: How will AI affect us? What are we already comfortable doing with it and how might that change in the future?
Proactively seek key roles’ perspectives across the firm (such as legal, data, risk, knowledge, business development) to consider all the behaviours potentially in play. Developing maturity and accountability in your approach is essential prior to adoption.
Make sure the risks and governance surrounding AI are fully understood before rolling it out for wider use. Don’t try to boil the ocean — identify a small cohort of early users (akin to establishing a centre of excellence) who can champion the technology. This will make training and adoption much easier. Remembering the accuracy and security of data that is ingested to learn ensures only relevant data is embedded to assist in responses from a generative AI based platform.
Don’t forget your clients. Consider how you convey the value and opportunities of AI when launching it in your firm — and how you bring clients into that conversation. The last thing you want to do is make them nervous. You need to communicate the values, ethics and safeguards your firm has in place effectively.
With this framework in place, Walker says, law firms will be well prepared to start tapping into a whole new paradigm of personal productivity and business efficiency unleashed by leaps forward in AI.