Danielle Benecke is the Founder and global head of Baker McKenzie’s Machine Learning Practice. Ahead of the Legal Innovators California conference on June 4 + 5, Artificial Lawyer spoke to her about genAI’s role at the firm and what can be described as ‘the genAI capability stack’ (see image below).
We cover several points in the interview, (also below), but three key things stood out for this site:
- Baker McKenzie’s focus on AI is long-running and they’ve been experimenting with different machine learning and generative AI technology for some time. So, now that LLMs have gone mainstream they already have a lot of expertise in place to leverage it.
- Danielle sees genAI as far from ‘a thing that you just slot into the firm’, it’s part of an entire integrated approach, layered from cloud and data infrastructure all the way up through productivity applications, to multi-practice tools, to function tools, to building custom applications for clients at the top of the capability stack.
- And this last segment, building custom applications, is something that Danielle and team focus on a lot, i.e. leveraging genAI to build and extend capabilities for the firm to meet client needs. The key point here is that the firm is seeking to extend what it does with genAI not just do what it did before better. See the video for some examples of what they’re doing in this regard and more exploration of related themes.
Press play to watch the video.
Danielle explained the stack diagram by saying: ‘This is an illustrative example of how leaders at large firms and enterprise in-house teams seem to be thinking about integrating advanced AI into their capability stacks.
‘It reflects our own experience, as well as the many conversations we have with firm and in-house leaders, other service providers and vendors, investors familiar with legal/professional services, and other industry experts.’
Overall, this shows a broad and integrated approach to genAI adoption and provides a useful model for other lawyers, both at firms and inhouse, to think about the technology.
If this is of interest, then come along to the Legal Innovators California conference where Danielle will be one of our many great speakers on genAI and a range of other subjects relevant to law firms and inhouse / legal ops teams.
Legal Innovators California conference, Jun 4 + 5, San Francisco
Day One is focused on law firms, and Day Two on inhouse and legal ops.
We have many great speakers attending the event, along with a group of pioneering legal tech companies and service providers – you can see some more about our speakers here. It will be two great days of education and inspiration! Join us and get ahead of the curve on all things legal tech, innovation and legal AI!
For ticket information, please see here. Don’t miss out on what will be a great event.
