Clifford Chance trailblazes Microsoft responsible AI to improve services for its legal clients

Clifford Chance LLP is a British multinational law firm headquartered in London, England. The largest law firm headquartered in the UK by revenue, having a total revenue of £2.04 billion in 2022–2023, the company is a digitalisation leader, focused on leveraging new technologies for the benefit of its clients.

Cutting-edge legal services 

Paul Greenwood, CIO at Clifford Chance, explains, “As a major law firm, we have to be the very best there is at handling text-based information… we are handling the most confidential, the most sensitive information every day.” 

Jessica Littlewood, Global Operations and Business Transformation Partner, adds, “We act for the businesses of today and tomorrow, providing them with cutting-edge legal services… we’re always looking around thinking: How do we get better? What can we do? What technology can we use?”

Building on the secure foundation of Microsoft Azure 

The legal firm recognises that this is an exciting time in the technology space, especially in cloud-computing and the opportunities that presents to deploy new, innovative solutions and artificial intelligence.

Jessica Littlewood explains that recent ambitions have questioned, “How can we use Azure OpenAI? How do we use it responsibly? And how do we use it in a way that really delivers for clients?”

For Clifford Chance, it means building on the secure, private, and scalable foundations of Microsoft Azure.

“We’re able, using Azure OpenAI as a workflow, to package together a number of different steps to produce a whole new way of delivering what our clients need,” Paul Greenwood explains. “One of the first things we did to benefit our business was to produce cognitive translations with Microsoft Translator. It turned out to be one of the fastest growing products we’ve ever released.”

Enjoying the benefits of Teams Premium

Clifford Chance is already exploring new AI opportunities, including those associated with Copilot for Microsoft 365. By rolling out Teams Premium, Clifford Chance is benefiting from intelligent recap and fine-grained capabilities to summarise and augment information. With fee earners billing in seven-minute increments, these efficiencies have the potential to lead to significant cost savings.

Paul Greenwood explains, “With Teams Premium, already, the early signs are that people are quite blown away by the capability.”

What’s more, data is better protected because the firm is leveraging the enhanced data security and encryption that Teams Premium offers.

Exploring the new potential of Microsoft’s responsible AI 

The firm is excited about the possibilities and the great position it is now in to build on the benefits already realised. 

“We’re really looking forward to what we can do with the new generation of large language models (LLMs), Microsoft Azure, Azure OpenAI, and Copilot for Microsoft 365,” enthuses Paul Greenwood. “The idea of being able to give people a personal assistant—something that can assist, augment, and even amplify their day-to-day work—is tremendously appealing in a very, very time-pressured environment.”

Jessica Littlewood agrees, “Azure OpenAI is going to free up our people’s time to do the stuff they love.”