Sutton: AI agent doing more than just legal work
A venture capital-backed law firm’s artificial intelligence (AI) agent is handling both legal and non-legal work for its lawyers, its founder has said – like creating files, drawing up ‘to do’ lists and drafting emails,
James Sutton, chief executive of Avantia Law, said “one of the biggest wins” from AI was that it made training “much faster” by giving paralegals “access to information at the right time.”
Mr Sutton said Avantia, an alternative business structure which specialises in work for the asset management industry, had developed an AI agent that acted as a “co-pilot or junior paralegal” and “looked like a chatbot”.
He said the agent did have a name, which would be revealed when it is formally launched next month.
The advantage of an AI agent was that it could do “more than just legal work” such as creating a contract, reviewing a document or searching precedents.
The agent could deal with “workflow tasks” like creating new files, drafting emails or preparing a ‘to do’ list for a lawyer.
Mr Sutton, who qualified as a solicitor at Slaughter and May before working as general counsel at Sculptor Capital Management, founded Avantia in 2019.
He said the ABS, based in London, had around 80 staff, two-thirds of whom were legal professionals. It is funded by Smedvig VC and Hoxton Ventures, both based in London, together with Ace Cap, based in Seattle. All three are shareholders.
“We are not required to raise more funding, but we will always look at funding opportunities.”
Mr Sutton said Avantia already has attorneys in the US and would be opening a customer relations and sales hub in New York in the first quarter of next year.
The law firm’s work covered the whole asset management industry, whether it was private equity, credit or real estate.
He said clients were suffering from “tech boredom” and “AI boredom”, with a “huge proliferation” of toolkits that plugged into OpenAI.
“Clients don’t care how the job is done. They just want the job done well and the problem solved for a cost-efficient amount.”
He said the advantage of AI agents was that they could “actually do some of the work” for lawyers, rather than simply being a technology toolkit.
“The reality is about demand and you need a human to look at the work output. You still need people ultimately to review work and interact with the client.
“We are not yet at the point of drafting a perfect contract without human interaction. We will get closer and closer to it.
“Human lawyers can go off and do more interesting work. The human world and regulation are getting more complex. There are plenty of things for lawyers to do. Lawyers do not need to worry about that for the moment.”
Mr Sutton said “one of the biggest wins” from AI, if not the biggest, was that it could make training lawyers much faster. “It’s about access to information at the right time.” This could help paralegals move quickly to being medium-level lawyers.
Instead of a paralegal trying to draft a document and an assistant solicitor rewriting it four times, AI could give the paralegal direct access to clauses previously drafted by lawyers at the firm, “spoon-feeding” the paralegal with the answers.
Mr Sutton added: “Everyone working in legal tech is still just solving problems. The journey is just starting. It is solving the problems that excites me.”
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