Linklaters has formed a team of 20 AI lawyers to deploy across its global network, helping practising lawyers to identify use cases and create and embed new working practices with tools such as Legora.
The first cohort is largely formed from internal lawyers and Linklaters has also hired in a handful of roles, in a significant investment for the magic circle law firm. Internally, lawyers were selected based on factors including recommendations from their practise groups, focusing on people who have intentionally engaged with GenAI tools in their free time and who have already developed some proficiency in the area.
The AI Lawyers will attend in-depth ‘bootcamp’ training to ensure that the team is bonded and to cover topics such as Linklaters’ strategic thinking on AI; the power user features of the firm’s tools; change management; and effective prompt and workflow creation. Following the training, they will work in practice groups and offices globally, leveraging their combined expertise to support Linklaters’ client-facing lawyers in the development of prompts and workflows, and advise on the use of AI to deliver wok for clients.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Linklaters’ director of AI delivery, Sarah Barnard, said: “We’ve identified these 20 individuals across different practises and multiple different jurisdictions, and we’ve said, ‘We are embedding you back into the practise group initially that you come from, that you’ve been trained in, that you have the relationships and the credibility in, but your full time job, your dedicated role is making sure that we have identified the use cases and implemented them into the processes that already exist to reduce friction as much as possible.’
“We know our lawyers are super busy delivering for clients and one of the things that we’ve heard from clients is, ‘This isn’t a side hustle. We don’t want an overworked lawyer to then be asked to think creatively about how they can implement GenAI into working practises. Because that will not result necessarily in the best thinking.’ So, what we’ve said is, ‘Let us carve out the space for people, our best people, our most creative people, to do that thinking alongside practising lawyers who are delivering for clients and who understand what clients want on a day-to-day basis.’
“The reason we’ve pulled them from the practise is because we want people who have very recent experience in delivering for clients. We think that’s really critical. But we want to give them that safe space to actually be able to deliver and to dedicate the time. It’s not, ‘Oh, I think I’ve made a breakthrough, but now I have to deliver urgent work in the old way.’ It’s start-to-finish transformational thinking and having the credibility to go to the practise and say, ‘I know what you do because I have done it, I did it very recently. I am your friend. I am your peer. I am your colleague. This is what I think you should try.’
Barnard, who spearheads Linklaters’ AI drive alongside structured finance partner Tom Quoroll, who is chair of the generative AI programme, says that the AI lawyers will have clear KPIs and may be moved between practise groups or, when and where appropriate, return to practise.
While, to many, the AI lawyers may sound like old-school knowledge managers, Barnard says there is an interplay between then, observing: “It’s integral to KM. We see what is being developed as very much part of our firm’s knowledge and treat it as such. Some of our lawyers are former knowledge lawyers. So we see that there is an interplay between them.”
She added: “It is an interrelated thing, not the same things because they are a fundamentally different skills. One is expertise in the law and owning of the data attached to the law that the firm has generated and making sure the output that we have is of the quality that linked leaders would always expect. The other is transforming the way that output is created and considering what the processes are and being able to pull back from it and say, ‘maybe we do this in a different way’. The outcome we expect to be the same.”
One of the AI lawyers we spoke to is Tanya Sadoughi, AI lead lawyer for Linklaters’ global banking practice, who was a banking fee-earner for the first five years of her career before being seconded to the innovation team.
Sadoughi told Legal IT Insider: “One month into my secondment, ChatGPT came out, and it was quite serendipitous because I inadvertently became one of the firm’s first AI lawyers. In the banking practice we felt like this technology was going to impact on our practice quite significantly, so due to my role switch, I’ve been very lucky to be involved in the firm’s GenAI projects from the beginning.”
Sadoughi was part of the core team that developed a GenAI contract analysis tool ReportIQ that was shortlisted by the FT Innovative Lawyers Awards Europe 2025 in its Innovation in Automation and AI Tools category. Sadoughi herself was named as a ‘commended individual.’
She told us: “I’ve been in a really lucky position to watch the firm go from pure experimentation to where we are at, which I would describe as a more sophisticated implementation, particularly since Tom and Sarah took over. The issue I was facing was that I loved the role that I was doing, which was a hybrid of legal and tech, but the issue was it was extremely hard to make at scale meaningful change when you are the only lawyer in your team serving an entire global cohort of lawyers and having to borrow resource from elsewhere.”
Also on the team is AI go-to-market lead Michael Kest, an associate who began his legal tech career as head of business development for startup Aora. Kest, during his training contract with Linklaters, was seconded to internally-built contract lifecycle management platform CreateIQ as a product manager.
Kest said that while it’s early days and the focus of his new role on the AI lawyers team is still being defined, he is working with Barnard and Quoroll and also senior management in the team “to define our strategy and how we are delivering new services with AI and what that means, it’s going beyond just delivering what we’re currently able to provide more efficiently and quicker.”
He added: “We have this incredible new technology and my role is really looking at how we can deliver new value. This is very much a client-led process where we’re seeing clients come in through different streams with different ideas, so it’s just really an incredibly exciting role.”
The AI lawyers are part of a shift at Linklaters from having a fully-fledged innovation team (which was disbanded this year) to embedding innovation within practice areas. Barnard said: “We have taken the view as a firm that innovation is just part of what we do and even the programme, which is run by Tom and I, is a programme, so it has a shelf life effectively. We’re not creating practise groups, we’re not creating new teams. We are creating a new way of working expedited by the lovely people on this call, but that is something that we see as transformational and on a trajectory, not a job that is a permanent role. It’s more we are changing the way that the law firm fundamentally delivers legal work.”
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