Innovation and Artificial Intelligence Learn about what our award winning innovation team has been up to.

Our innovation strategy and what success looks like

Our innovation strategy is linked to utilising new and emerging technologies to make us agile in a very dynamic market. We are using AI across many areas of our business including PI, corporate, commercial, real estate and internal business use cases.

Success for us with legal AI will enable our lawyers to focus only on those elements of the work that they currently do that requires proper, formal, legal input.

Weightmans’ Innovation Group have learnt much through experimenting

For example:

• In terms of AI, everything still starts with collecting or extracting the raw data reliably, using legal reasoning to make a decision before recycling those insights to inform or change future actions.
• Much of what is termed AI is simply "clever search". Very clever to be fair, but "search" nonetheless.
• We cannot innovate alone. Our role in the AI world is as legal subject matter experts deployed in collaboration with clients, academia and software experts to deliver practical solutions that fix our clients’ problems.
• The key is being clear as to the precise nature of the problem you are trying to solve.
• Sometimes what you end up with is not what you started out to fix but the exercise of Innovation can nevertheless result in products and solutions that turn out to be useful in their own right.
• None of the technology is in fact ‘magic’, although it can appear so. It also requires a lot of human input in the background, before the magic can happen.

Our insights

We regularly produce insights on innovation, artificial intelligence and technology and how it applies to our clients.

Read our latest articles

How is our innovation progressing?

The Innovation Group are undertaking many proofs of concept and are working with many major clients on some of the projects. We have looked at the legal reasoning side of legal AI to explore how AI can assist with decision making and we have also explored information extraction. We are also looking to see how the application of data science can derive insights from the data which we hold on matters for a number of our clients and for our own internal benefit.

Our approach is grounded in computer science theory and we collaborate with Liverpool University (as well as a number of commercial organisations like Kira) to look to see how we may apply AI-based legal technology to the work that we do. We are one of the first collaborations between academia and commercial organisations in a study on law and technology, allowing academics the opportunity to put their theories into practice.

Our research and development has narrowed our focus to two approaches, both of which do different things and solve two different problems. The first product we have trained and are currently testing is a system that is designed to extract data from documents. We are experimenting with it in a number of ways and are working closely with clients in the insurance and corporate sphere.

The second approach we are testing can apply logic to a given set of facts utilising a decision engine approach from our work with the University. We have several different areas of law being developed using this software, including assisting with making liability decisions in industrial deafness claims.

We are also working on linking up the information extraction and the decision engine approaches so that they can work together.

Our approach to innovation

"What I believe sets us apart is that our approach to innovation is about investing in how our people, rather than ‘robots’ alone, will advance the firm. Our employees and several clients are involved in analysing and testing the systems we’re developing and we’re benefiting from working with some of the country’s leading thinkers on the relationship between AI and the law."

Stuart Whittle, Business Services and Innovation Director.

Awards

We are delighted to be recognised for our work in innovation and technology:

Winners

Shortlisted

Memberships and partnerships

• Tech London Advocates Blockchain Working Group
• Manchester Law and Technology Initiative
• Litig
• Neota's Client Advisory Board
• Thomson Reuters' Client Advisory Board
• UKLTA

Law and Technology Podcast

Weightmans is proud to have been a member of the University of Manchester's Law & Technology Initiative for the last two years. As leaders in their field, Weightmans Director of Innovation Stuart Whittle and Innovation Manager Catriona Wolfenden joined other partner firms to take part in a series of roundtable discussions, provide a comprehensive view of the current landscape and look to the future of legal technology.

Media highlights

We believe our approach is pioneering, and we are delighted that the media from across the insurance, legal, technology and business sectors have agreed with us.

• Lawyers Who Code: Stuart Whittle (Legal Geek)
• Legal Focus: AI augmented decision making is a game-changer for claims handling efficiency (Insurance Day)
• More on Weightmans’ litigation decision engine (Legal IT Insider)
• Weightmans strikes partnership with University of Liverpool and Kira Systems (North West Business Insider)
• Weightmans partners with University of Liverpool and Kira on major decision engine (Legal Technology Insider)
• Kira, Liverpool Uni + Weightmans Partner on Legal AI Reasoning System (Artificial Lawyer)
• The tech pioneers: 24 evangelists for change in the legal sector (The Lawyer)
• The Full List: Which Law Firms + Tech Co.s Won Innovate UK Funding? (Artificial Lawyer)
• Weightmans secures “six figure” government grant for PI costs forecasting tool (Legal Technology Insider)
• Weightmans and Frontier Labs secure six-figure funding for AI project (Prolific North)

What is the problem we are trying to solve and how do you seek the right solution? Our Innovation Manager Catriona Wolfenden spoke to Kira’s CEO, Noah Waisberg, about Kira’s upcoming book, AI for Lawyers. They also discussed AI maturity models, and how a legal organisation can determine whether it is fully leveraging AI’s benefits.

Academic articles

• Noise induced hearing loss: Building an application using the ANGELIC methodology (Journal article)
• Noise induced hearing loss: An application of the angelic methodology (Conference Paper)

Funding

Weightmans secures government grant for AI and data project that will transform legal services