The firm has been looking for opportunities to build its AI muscle
Wotton + Kearney (W+K) is the first Australian law firm to adopt the generative AI tool Cicero, which was developed for the Australian legal industry and refined on Australian law.
According to W+K, Cicero is the first fully private legal AI solution; it ensures that all firm information is stored securely onshore and behind a firewall. Thus, no data will be processed by third parties.
“AI is a primary focus of our firm's innovation and transformation strategy, and we have been taking a broad and multifaceted approach. We are looking at opportunities to buy existing AI tools, build our own AI muscle, and partner with existing and emerging tech vendors”, said Charles Simon, managing partner of casualty and operations at W+K. “New technology is not without its challenges, and our focus is on ensuring privacy and security as well as safeguarding client data in the best way possible”.
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Cicero was developed by Australian AI solution provider Automatise. It is powered by locally hosted large language models (LLMs) from Meta and Mistral AI. Automatise refined the LLMs for Australian legal use cases to facilitate the generation of summaries and legal document analysis.
W+K CEP David Kearney said that the tool would help ensure “compliance with current and evolving legislative requirements” like APRA CPS 234 and CPS 230, as well as allow the firm’s lawyers to “work smarter”.
“Cicero has been purpose-built to assist in both litigation and non-litigation workflows, helping investigations by finding critical documents that support or break case theories, draft chronologies, and perform both high-level and detailed summarisations and text extractions of documents in active matters. Wotton + Kearney’s steadfast commitment to their clients’ privacy, to data sovereignty, and data protection standards aligns precisely with our offering from a values perspective”, said Joseph Rayment, managing director of Automatise.