Kirkland, Palantir Launch AI Tool Targeting Fund Formation (1)

Kirkland & Ellis has launched a multi-year partnership with Palantir Technologies Inc. to develop custom artificial intelligence solutions, starting with a tool to make private equity fundraising more efficient.

The proprietary platform is designed to “transform” private equity fundraising, the law firm and the AI company said Thursday.

“This engine is more than just an efficient way to do the work we’ve always done,” said Erica Berthou, a Kirkland partner and global executive committee member, during Palantir’s AIPCon 10 event in Miami. “It delivers better outcomes.”

The private equity tool marks the first product launch since Kirkland last week said it was committing $500 million to building its proprietary AI platform. The reveal comes during a debate inside the legal industry over whether law firms should develop their own AI platforms or rely on external software developed by companies such as Harvey.

Kirkland chose to partner with Palantir to build its custom AI solutions so that it can offer a differentiated experience and help the firm “raise hundreds of billions a year” for more than 1,000 fund formation clients, Berthou said. The Palantir partnership is “a revolutionary change” and “just the beginning of what we are innovating together,” she said.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp at the same event emphasized the importance of owning unique code and data to maintain a competitive advantage. “What is valuable?” he asked. “Something that you own, that you have, that no one else has, that can’t be outsourced.”

Palantir cannot sell the resulting platform to other firms, a Kirkland spokesperson said.

The partnership is already drawing scrutiny from legal ethics experts. John Browning, a former appeals court judge in Dallas who has served on the State Bar of Texas Taskforce for Responsible AI and the Law, said Palantir’s involvement raises questions about professional responsibility that individual Kirkland lawyers and and the firm will need to answer.

“Any time a law firm embarks upon a partnership like this with a technology company, some fundamental questions exist about the guardrails that will be in place,” Browning said.

He drew a parallel to early cloud computing contracts, in which some law firms failed to scrutinize terms of service that designated client data as the platform’s property. “Lawyers have an ethical obligation not only to preserve the confidentiality of client communications, but also to safeguard client property, including client data,” he said. “Private companies aren’t held to the ethical standards lawyers are.”

Last week, Fried Frank rolled out a tool it built internally that leverages OpenAI’s ChatGPT to streamline its fund formation practice. A&O Shearman and Harvey launched a series of agentic AI agents last year for complex legal tasks—including fund formation—that will be sold to clients and other law firms, the opposite of Kirkland’s closed model.

Kevin Frazier, director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law, said Kirkland’s move signals an industry-wide inflection point.

“Kirkland & Ellis is on the vanguard of what will be a general move to rethink every aspect of the practice and business of law in the Age of AI,” Frazier said. “Other firms will follow as their clients ask why they’re not following Kirkland’s lead. It’s an open question whether this will lead to a contraction or change in the nature of the legal market.”