Meridian AI is a genAI system that rapidly turns ‘client listening’ interviews into highly organised and searchable text to provide actionable intelligence. It’s a huge time-saver that should really help law firm Business Development teams – and has several other applications, (see below).
The company behind it, Meridian West, is best known for their client relationship consulting. They are now working with tech company Rubiklab and leveraging the Claude foundational model to provide the offering.
So, what’s it all about? BD and client relationship teams at law firms can often find themselves doing dozens of interviews to help the lawyers get a better understanding of market needs, how clients view them, and to help with wider strategic planning. Those interviews, sometimes face to face, sometimes over a call, are then written up and collated, with a consultant or BD team member having to piece all the information together to build a clear picture of key issues. As you can imagine, it’s laborious and time-consuming.
It’s exactly the type of job that an LLM was made for. Plus, once you’ve sorted out all of the text into key subjects and areas of significant interest, there is then a natural language Q&A capability to interrogate the collated information further.
As Ben Kent, the Founder Director of Meridian West, told Artificial Lawyer: ‘It can summarise the interview and then gives you key takeaways. But, it can also give a summary of all the interviews [on a client listening project] and highlight key comments.’
There is also a RAG element, with key quotes from certain people coming with a clear citation so that you can understand who is saying what.
Kent also noted that the system helps to reduce biases that a human interviewer may introduce. (Although there will always be some implicit bias in all systems, AI or otherwise). Plus, they are looking at then applying the genAI tech to public documents from or about clients that can also be scraped and then connected to the information from the interviews to give a fuller picture, including spotting areas of demand that a firm can plan for.
Overall, this site can really see the value in this and empathises with those who have to turn dozens of client interviews into action points. Before starting Artificial Lawyer, this site’s founder worked full-time as a strategy consultant to the legal sector, where conducting major interview projects was a foundational part of any consulting job. Those interviews, which were touch-typed into text documents, then very carefully collated and analysed to pull out key strands of thought, were a highly intensive task and took a long time.
Today, and with something such as Meridian AI, you could complete this stage of a project in a fraction of the time. And as Kent noted, the same approach used for BD and client listening can be used for a whole range of needs, for consulting as noted above, and also perhaps for legal work itself such as analysing depositions and reviewing court transcripts. In short, anywhere you have a lot of unstructured audio-to-text information that needs careful analysis could see benefits from this approach.
Kent added that they’ve already worked with several law firms, such as Mills & Reeve, as well as Deloitte.
One last question is: does this remove the need for consultants and BD experts (which is the same question lawyers ask about their own adoption of AI)?
Kent stated: ‘It does not replace human judgement, but it is a really, really good assistant for a first draft. It covers all the points, but then you can focus in on certain areas.’
I.e. internal BD teams and those advising them on strategic decisions will still very much be needed, what is removed is a lot of the legwork that no-one especially wants to do.
Overall, it’s great to see a ‘legal tech’ tool which is not only for lawyers and also not at the lower value end of LLM work, e.g. drafting a marketing email, but rather in this case really adding value and providing great efficiency for consultants and law firms’ internal BD and marketing teams.