Kirkland & Ellis Investing $500 Million to Build AI Platform (1)

Kirkland & Ellis has committed $500 million over the next three to four years to develop its own proprietary artificial intelligence platform, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The investment represents one of the most ambitious technological bets ever made by a law firm. It also signals Kirkland’s strategy to control its own tech to outperform competitors in the legal industry’s competitive race to harness AI.

Kirkland did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Jon Ballis, Kirkland’s chair, previously told Bloomberg Law that Kirkland’s scale—it generated $10 billion in revenue last year—gives it leeway to “take big swings.” He said the firm should invest in new initiatives around 1% of its revenues, which last year would be around $100 million.

The AI investment raises the urgency of an ongoing debate in the legal industry: whether firms will rely on external software developed by the likes of Harvey or Legora, or compete by developing their own AI platforms.

“If every associate at every top firm has equivalent access to the same chatbots and research tools, then the tools stop being a differentiator,” said Seth Chandler, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center. “It’s got to be the firm’s own internal knowledge that becomes the difference maker.”

Kirkland is among several law firms making AI investments. Fried Frank said Thursday it is rolling out a new, internally-built AI platform to streamline its practice advising private equity funds.

Linklaters this month launched a team of data scientists and lawyers who will work together to build bespoke AI workflows for specific clients and matters. Littler Mendelson, the largest employer-side labor law firm in the US, said in April it created a new top position to steer the firm’s adoption of an internally developed AI tool.

“Today’s rate of AI adoption is the lowest it will ever be among the legal profession,” said Kevin T. Frazier, the inaugural AI fellow at the University of Texas School of Law who leads its AI innovation and law program. “We are only going to see more and more firms explore more and more opportunities with AI.”

Kirkland is looking to hire dozens of employees in jobs related to AI and legal technology innovation, according to its online career board.

Jobs for “AI Infrastructure Directors” posted this week show they will pay more than $300,000 a year to build and scale “enterprise-grade AI platforms that power innovation across a complex organization.”

The job entails managing “on‑premise GPU environments and Microsoft Azure–based AI platforms.” That describes a Kirkland facility that houses the types of expensive AI processing chips most popularly sold by Nvidia Corp., a firm spokesperson confirmed.

Graphics processing units, known as GPUs, help train large language models and deliver results from them through a process referred to as inference. The chips can cost tens of thousands of dollars each.

Ballis told the Financial Times, which first reported Kirkland’s AI spend, that 180 tech professionals were working on developing the platform. It’s informed by information from a group of 250 Kirkland lawyers about how they did their jobs, he said.

Kirkland’s lawyers have been heavily involved in the buildout of AI infrastructure by representing the largest asset managers investing in the projects. This month, Kirkland advised Blackstone on the formation of a new AI-native enterprise services firm that will work with companies to bring Anthropic’s Claude model into their core business operations.