Elisabeth Cappuyns on Turning AI Interest Into Adoption

I enjoy dabbling in a variety of different activities and subjects, ranging from traveling and exploring new places (we just went to the Galapagos Islands!), to antiquing and finding handmade goods, to reading historical fiction and watching dystopian shows, to stargazing and learning about local foraging.

For me, the range is a big part of the appeal, as it allows and encourages you to make connections between diverse, often unrelated topics. And it provides different perspectives, ranging from 30,000 feet and beyond, down to the literal weeds. In addition, looking both backwards and forwards helps to understand trends and learn more about our current environment. If I had to draw a connection to work and innovation, these experiences can be both enlightening and inspiring, and they can form the basis of new ideas to implement at work.

There isn’t so much a pivotal moment, as an evolution of approaches stemming from my different roles over time. Starting with my background as a corporate lawyer, all parties were moving towards a common goal, even as they were representing opposite interests and providing their own expertise. When I moved into knowledge management, which is more behind the scenes, that role required delivering consistent, yet targeted resources, plus an understanding of the limited technology solutions available at that time. And then my involvement in practice management gave me an opportunity to learn and better understand the business of law. These experiences have provided a solid foundation for supporting and adjusting to the developing needs of our lawyers and the practice of law.

I am also very lucky to have an amazing KM team with a variety of skills, legal backgrounds, and personalities, which has allowed us to pivot and prioritize during these constantly changing times. I try not to micromanage and give my team members the opportunity to experiment and explore, while they are also building their own crucial relationships with our lawyers and leadership. This approach has allowed us to identify opportunities for innovation across various practices and matters, and to be real partners in those initiatives.

I have an expansive view of knowledge management, as it sits at the intersection of the practice of law and technology, and increasingly also the business of law. To me this inherently involves innovation, and as we’re moving from the evolution of the practice of law towards its transformation, that has become only more obvious. These developments are making it easier for our department to initiate and contribute to innovation initiatives.

In addition, as one of the first big law firms that made a GenAI legal assistant tool available firmwide in 2023, the spotlight has been on our firm and our knowledge department regarding our approach and process for implementing this new functionality. In our legal KM community, we have been sharing our processes, requirements, and training approaches since then, and it has been really interesting to discuss the ongoing complexities and anticipate new challenges with our peers.

We have been evaluating and testing several GenAI tools since late 2022. Initially, we were drawn to Harvey because we heard and saw that it had relevant functionality for transactional matters, including its redline analysis. During our pilot, though, we noticed that our litigators were also very engaged. Ultimately it was a combination of Harvey’s functionality, together with our earlier experiences using GenAI and our understanding of our lawyers’ needs, that resulted in our selection of Harvey.

Generally speaking, we have seen adoption across the board, in terms of seniority, practice area, and region. That said, we do see spikes in adoption and usage that are often triggered by a lawyer or team in a particular group or office as they highlight their use cases and results. Your basic watercooler moments.

We meet our lawyers where they are, and that means we offer a range of services, communications, and training options in different formats to support their needs and preferences. For example, we offer live trainings by practice group, which are then recorded and made available on demand. We also offer targeted practice-, subgroup-, and seniority-specific trainings, as requested, and we can adjust those to focus on either foundational or advanced use cases.

In addition, we schedule monthly GenAI open houses, and we send monthly emails and regular newsletters with updates and use case stories. We also make a range of support resources and toolkits available on our intranet, and we provide one-on-one consultations with lawyers and matter teams to find the best approaches and solutions for their requirements.

More recently, we started a video campaign with short videos to showcase a particular use case or functionality, which have been very popular!

Without giving away our secret sauces, here are a few examples of really helpful applications:

• Disputes: for our case law and regulatory trackers when we’re adding a high volume of new cases, creating a review table to extract the information needed to populate our trackers (case name, docket number, court, counsel, etc.), as well as putting that new activity into the format we use for our monthly update emails
• Transactions: for our purchase and financing agreements, using the review tables and filters to then prompt the creation of disclosure schedules in a custom format
• Pro bono: in innocence and veteran benefits cases, reviewing large sets of documents, including medical records and handwritten reports, to help ascertain eligibility and extract relevant information

Initially, the main focus was making sure that our users understood GenAI’s capabilities and limitations, and that they would properly use the right tool for the correct application. This required a whole new governance framework to support these efforts.

While that is still important and continues to evolve, we then shifted more towards adoption and increased usage, with trainings and other resources to share different GenAI applications. We are tracking those metrics and they help us identify power users and areas for improvement.

We are also engaging more with clients about our and their use of GenAI, and we are working with them on specific matter applications.

The popular use and widespread availability of GenAI piqued many of our lawyers’ interest and opened up conversations with them beyond our typical interactions. That said, not everyone was on board initially. But as word spread about the functionality and as clients asked more questions about our use of AI, we saw an additional uptick in interest. By the time everyone was able to get access, we had a dedicated group of users and an eager group of other lawyers who could build on those prior experiences.

Because of this broad spectrum of interests and experiences, we continue to expand the range and depth of resources and support we offer our lawyers, which has been a helpful framework for upskilling our users.