When every firm has the same AI, the edge is the drafting only you own. 

By Giles Thompson, Chief Revenue Officer, Avvoka

"Everyone has the same AI now. What have we got that the firm across the street hasn't?"

A partner at a New York firm asked me that a few weeks ago. I hear some version of it in most meetings, and it's a hard question to answer well.

Answering it is what Avvoka is built for. It helps to be in the same city as the firms asking it, which is why our first US office is now open in New York.

Where the edge comes from

The assistants keep getting better. What limits them is the material they draft from. Ask one for a clause and it builds from the open internet rather than from your firm, so what comes back is competent and generic. Competent and generic is exactly what a good firm can't afford.

A firm's real advantage is the work it has already done well: the closed deals and the judgment a senior partner applies without having to think about it. Generic AI can't draw on any of that. The more a firm's drafting runs through it, the more its output looks like everyone else's.

Conan Hines, Global Head of Innovation and Knowledge at Fried Frank, put it well: "Firms have always known the value buried in their deal history and have never had a practical way to extract it." The knowledge is already there. What's been missing is a way to get it out and put it back to work. 

Drafting as infrastructure

The firms pulling ahead treat drafting as infrastructure they build. A tool helps one lawyer work faster. Infrastructure makes the firm's best work reproducible across matters and offices, without the person who created it in the room.

In practice, it comes down to two things.

The first is capturing the work. Knowledge teams have done this for years: they pull the best language out of closed deals by hand, then automating it with platforms like Avvoka. It's painstaking and it never really stops, because every template needs maintaining as the market moves. Curate, our new product, takes the heaviest part of that off their hands. It reads a firm's executed deals, shows where they differ and turns them into lawyer-approved templates, then helps keep those templates current. The standard everything new is drafted from stays the firm's own, with far less of the manual grind.

The second is putting the right material underneath the AI. Avvoka increasingly works behind the assistant a lawyer already uses, so lawyers don't have to go somewhere else to use it. Much of our work now sits here. We are Harvey's only current document automation partner, and we work with Legora, Copilot and Claude. In each case Avvoka gives the assistant the firm's own approved templates and drafting logic, so it starts from the firm's standard instead of a blank page. The lawyer keeps the tool they chose. It just has the firm's best work to build on, so the output reads as the firm's own.

Why New York?

More than a quarter of the AmLaw 100 already draft on Avvoka, including Fried Frank, A&O Shearman, Manatt and Katten. 

New York was the obvious place for our first US office. Much of the most demanding drafting in the US market happens here, and many of the firms we already work with are based here. Being in the same city means we hear the hardest problems first and can build for them. 

If you're in New York and would like to see what this looks like on your own documents, the team is here and we'd be very glad to show you. Book a meeting.