Kirkland + Palantir Partner For PE Platform

Palantir and Kirkland & Ellis have launched a proprietary enterprise platform for private equity fundraising. It follows the news that the US firm will build its own legal AI systems – and as AL believes, fine-tune open source models as well. (See more below on what Palantir offers via AI.)

Overall, this suggests that at least one key element of the Kirkland strategy will be all about working with Palantir, although we don’t know yet if Palantir will be handling all of it.

Of additional interest is that Palantir, which tends to work with government agencies, is now going after the legal tech world as well, even if it’s via PE. So, one could argue we now have: OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft….and now Palantir all playing in the legal tech vertical, in terms of Big Tech.

The platform is part of a multiyear partnership to ‘deliver together custom solutions tailored to the needs of Kirkland’s clients by leveraging Palantir’s Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP)’, they said.

The fund formation engine – (and PE is a central pillar of the firm’s work) – will enable Kirkland to ‘securely scale its institutional knowledge and judgment, streamline complex legal workflows and more efficiently support fund formation clients and their investors across the entire private equity fundraising lifecycle’, they noted.

And the bit about tapping knowledge and improving workflows is a strong echo of what was said in their first announcement. That suggests the top tier firm was referring to Palantir when they did the big reveal about their plans a few days ago.

Through its work with Palantir, Kirkland is ‘building a new operating model for legal services: one that centralizes and compounds the expertise of its most senior lawyers, embeds that expertise across workflows and makes it available at scale across more than 1,000 lawyers supporting its Investment Funds Group’, they addd.

Erica Berthou, Partner and Global Executive Committee Member at Kirkland & Ellis, commented: ‘We are building this revolutionary fund formation engine to help clients navigate that complexity more efficiently across the full lifecycle of a fundraise and beyond. By combining Kirkland’s market-leading funds expertise with Palantir’s technology infrastructure, we will deliver better value and outcomes in addressing the evolving needs of both GPs and LPs by bringing to bear our most senior judgment and our extensive knowledge base.’

Ryan Taylor, Chief Legal Officer of Palantir, concluded. ‘Together, we are disrupting the global fundraising market and advancing a broader vision for its future – an enterprise operating system that compounds every transaction relationship, decision and obligation into a continuously improving platform.’

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As to Palantir’s AI system, there’s a lot going on, but they stress the fact that it’s focused on workflows.

What it does:

‘AI-driven data pipelining

Integrate LLMs into your pipelines and run them at scale—with error handling, automatic retries, guaranteed outputs schemas, and other production-caliber tooling included.

AI-driven logic building

Build, test, and release feature-rich, AI-powered functions that leverage the Ontology within your applications.

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And if you’re wondering what the Ontology feature is that they refer to it’s this:

‘The Palantir Ontology is a core architectural layer that translates raw, siloed data into a “digital twin” of a business. It maps disjointed tables into real-world concepts (like Customers, Shipments, or Facilities), linking data with business logic and actionable operations.’

I.e. it’s a core part of how Palantir works. And the digital twin aspect is one that several legal tech companies are developing now, including Eudia, for example. Basically this means studying staff, workflows, past data, and creating a model that can emulate that work and decision processes, i.e. a twin, which is digital. A less fancy way of saying this is ‘playbook’. With that in place you can then guide AI systems to do what you want based on existing workflows.

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Workflow visualization

Automatically visualize the objects, functions, and actions that connect your ontology to your applications. Understand the provenance between these entities.

Workflow monitoring

Log actions taken and track Ontology metrics to improve and debug workflows.

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And also,

Compare models

Compare the performance of different AI models on your functions to optimize cost and performance.

Continuously monitor performance

Customize AI performance benchmarks for ongoing measurement, with results automatically published in metrics dashboards.

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And finally,

Build AI apps in the language of your business

Develop AI-powered applications based on a singular, decision-centric model of the enterprise that includes high-fidelity objects, logic, and actions.

Leverage Ontology SDK from your IDE

Enable your developers to seamlessly build with AI using Ontology SDK from within their preferred IDEs, such as VS Code.

Maximize reusability

Drive the cost of AI application building towards zero with the ability to re-use shared representations of the enterprise from your centrally managed ontology.’

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Legal Innovators California Conference is Next Week – June 10 and 11 in San Francsico. 

For the first time at the California conference, we are providing complimentary tickets, which includes all sessions, breaks, lunch, and the evening networking drinks reception in the heart of the Bay Area, which in turn is the bustling centre of the global AI industry – and which is now changing the legal tech world itself.

Legal Innovators California is also the largest and most pioneering legal tech event on the West Coast of the USA – but we only hold it once per year, each June. So, if you’d like to join us next week, then get your skates on and claim your ticket! There’s so much happening now in legal tech and AI, this is an incredible opportunity to be right at the center of the action, with those who are shaping the future of our industry!