DWF understands generative AI will transform knowledge work. It wants to lead in AI in law and professional services.
DWF deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot to every colleague.
Significant and varied personal productivity and quality improvements are now being built on with platform productivity improvements.
Using Copilot, I was able to complete a task in just seven hours that would normally take seven days. This efficiency allowed us to quickly articulate and publish a new service proposition, providing a competitive advantage.
Hilary Ross, UK&I Regional Managing Partner, DWF
“DWF is innovative in a number of ways, including in our structure,” says Chris Stefani, Chief Financial Officer at DWF.
DWF was the first law firm to complete a main market listing on the London stock exchange. It is now the largest law firm to be taken off the market with investment from the mid-market private equity firm, Inflexion. This structure makes the firm well positioned to innovate quickly and invest globally in cutting-edge technologies, including AI.
“I’m a big believer in using technology to make us more efficient, provide a better experience for our colleagues, and deliver a great service to our clients,” states Chris Stefani. “Our aim is to be the leading provider of integrated legal services globally and to be a professional services firm emanating out of the law. We know knowledge work will be disrupted hugely by AI and we’d like to be at the forefront of that change.”
To position itself as an AI leader in the legal sector, DWF chose to partner with Microsoft.
“Microsoft offers a level of partnering that is a true partnership,” affirms Jon Grainger, Chief Technology Officer at DWF. “We couldn’t have gone so far, so fast without Microsoft’s support. The team at Microsoft have done incredible things.”
“The AI services that Microsoft is now offering were a pipe dream as little as two years ago,” Jon Grainger continues. “A year ago, Microsoft came to present its AI solutions, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, to more than 30 senior leaders in the firm, and at our Global Leadership conference. There was a fantastic buzz. We can all see that AI is going to bring so much change to how a knowledge business operates; in maintaining competitive position, attracting talent, and retaining clients. There’s a big opportunity for us here to get ahead of that disruption in a positive way.”
With this vision in mind, DWF rolled out Microsoft 365 Copilot globally to all users across the business in early 2024. The decision has proved transformative.
The decision to dive straight into a global rollout was an easy one for the DWF leadership team. Analysis of return on investment metrics meant that for senior fee earners the return on investment for a Copilot licence could be measured in minutes per week.
Jon Grainger explains, “The need to break even created such a low bar in the business case that it tipped over into ‘we can start looking at this as a fantastic colleague value proposition’ as well. If you join DWF, you’re going to get Copilot. We’re not hierarchical. We’re not making a distinction. We’re saying everyone in the company deserves it—and I’m really proud we’ve been able to say that.”
Feedback from Microsoft 365 Copilot users across the business has been phenomenal. Simon Murray, Partner and Head of Insurance Business Services at DWF, says, “Copilot is a massive efficiency tool.”
Grace Dunsmoir, Senior Associate at DWF, explains that her use of Copilot started by chance. “I was having a really stressful day, so I thought I’ll use Copilot to summarise what’s coming up next week. It was a gamechanger. Copilot pulls everything together from Outlook, Teams, and my Calendar with references so I can see where it’s pulled the information from. I use that prompt every week now. For me, who worries about everything, it’s been huge from a mental health perspective.”
“I like to use Copilot in Outlook on my phone to help me draft emails when on the go,” she adds. “Copilot is especially useful if I’m trying to send a response quickly or to reword a draft to improve the tone.”
“What was so powerful to me is the fact you don’t need time to learn how to use Copilot,” Grace Dunsmoir emphasises. “You can easily use Copilot in what we do. Obviously, it gets better the more you use it and as you get better with prompting, but you can pick it up and benefit from day one.”
DWF users have been eager to innovate and explore different ways to use Copilot to support their work. For example, Grace Dunsmoir is now using Copilot to transcribe meetings and to speed up translations.
She explains, “Copilot is great for transcribing multi-discipline conferences where we’re taking evidence from different experts. After, we can query that content using Copilot. It’s great to be able to ask Copilot for a bulleted list of the evidence from a particular expert, for example.”
Grace Dunsmoir adds, “For cross-border cases, we usually send documents out for translation. That’s expensive and not very quick. Now, if I get a police report from France, say, I can ask Copilot for a translation and prepare a report efficiently for our client. That’s more efficient for me and faster service for the client. If the document is going to an expert or for evidence, it will still be translated and authenticated but there’s no longer that delay for the client and the firm isn’t rushing for quick-time translation.”
Copilot brings another level of being able to access, search, and share information that we’ve never even dreamed of.
Jon Grainger, Chief Technology Officer, DWF
DWF is seeing a wide variety of use cases in all roles and functional areas of the business.
“Copilot is helping us to know our clients better and differentiate ourselves from the competition,” reports Simon Murray. “I use it to summarise the lengthy annual reports of our clients. I can drop a 150-page report into Copilot and ask for a bulleted summary with a focus on litigation and future plans for the business. I can distribute those three pages of bullets to the account team and the entire team will read it and know the customer better.”
The research power of Copilot is also aiding learning and delivering research efficiencies. Simon Murray explains, “I used Copilot to research and write a script for a presentation I was giving. Once I’d edited the script, I asked Copilot to produce bullet points from it to create a framework for the talk and to produce two paragraphs of blurb to promote the talk. Then I asked it to create the PowerPoint slides from those bullet points.”
“Instead of two days of research and creating and formatting the deck, it was all done in less than an hour and a half. It was a massive time saving and it meant I wasn’t worrying about the presentation. I could spend my time getting the subject matter nailed. That was really useful because I received a number of questions afterwards which strayed into areas I previously wouldn’t have been comfortable answering.”
Time saved can be redirected into improving the client experience and powering continuous improvement and quality initiatives.
When Hilary Ross, UK&I Regional Managing Partner at DWF, spotted a new commercial opportunity she used Copilot to help draft out the parameters of the opportunity and the internal briefings and client communications around it. Her use of Copilot dramatically reduced the time to market for that opportunity.
Hilary Ross explains, "Using Copilot, I was able to complete a task in just seven hours that would normally take seven days. This efficiency allowed us to quickly articulate and publish a new service proposition, providing a competitive advantage."
“Copilot’s on-the-fly ability to get answers with verifiable references changes the pace at which we can work,” agrees Simon Murray. “For example, when we’re in an exec meeting talking about a particular subject, we can look up a client’s ambition or a new area of business or regulation on the fly, rather than parking it and coming back to it at a later date.”
Charlotte Gaughan, Senior Brand Manager at DWF, returned from her second maternity leave in summer 2024. Despite it being a new tool to her, Copilot has proved pivotal for Charlotte’s successful reintegration to the business.
She explains, “DWF is very progressive; work here has pace and change and innovation—that’s partly why it’s such a great place to work. But it also means it can be pretty hard to orient yourself when you come back.”
“In some ways, returning from maternity leave is harder than starting a new job because people have expectations about your current knowledge and contextual appreciation,” she continues. “Someone told me about Copilot so I thought I would try it. I asked about a project that was running: What’s its purpose? Who’s on the team? I wasn’t expecting much, but it gave me a whole lesson on the project. I felt empowered and in control for the first time in weeks.”
Charlotte Gaughan adds, “Copilot has been like a buddy to get me back to work. I feel really enabled by it. And it’s taken pressure off my team because they don’t need to spend so much time reorienting me. I’m so impressed by Copilot, I sent a message to our CTO to say ‘thank you for making sure it was rolled out firmwide’ so I had a chance to use it. I will be recommending Copilot to everyone coming back from maternity leave.”
“Copilot has become like another pair of hands for me,” affirms Grace Dunsmoir. “I’m working to high-pressured court deadlines and there’s a lot of money and risk at stake. Our clients expect us to do things properly; we’re instructed for our experience. Copilot’s ability to sense check everything and be that second pair of eyes gives me real peace of mind.”
“Copilot is a great cure for procrastination,” agrees Simon Murray. “It eliminates ‘blank page syndrome’ and the drudgery work that can be really challenging from a mental health perspective. It’s better for our clients because we can be quicker and more detailed. Copilot gives us the ability to focus on where we can best deliver value for clients rather than taking time on less valuable elements of the work.”
“DWF is one of the few professional services firms that has the strategic vision to deploy Copilot across the business and that’s a real positive from my point of view,” says Simon Murray. “Copilot is a great technology for everybody. Even people who aren’t super interested in tech are having success using Copilot and I think part of that is the natural language interface.”
Charlotte Gaughan agrees, “From a colleague experience point of view, Copilot is another reason why it’s attractive to work for DWF. Copilot is a luxury to help you get through and speed things up.”
To encourage further experimentation and adoption, the DWF team are planning to share videos of Copilot Champions in which they explain the different ways they use Copilot to drive value and enhance their working day.
Grace Dunsmoir says, “People need to see how it can help them. Then, Copilot will naturally become something that people use across the business all the time because it’s just so helpful.”
DWF has found that sharing user experience is key to the successful adoption and continually increasing ROI from Copilot. At the same time, it is focusing strongly on the security, ethics, information governance, and compliance around adopting Copilot.
“Copilot brings another level of being able to access, search, and share information that we’ve never even dreamed of,” warns Jon Grainger. “This makes Copilot’s integration with Purview critical for us. We’re able to see if there is a prompt that needs investigation. And everyone who uses the platform knows that—if we need to—we can review prompts and their responses. That leads to the right kind of behaviour when you adopt a solution like this.”
“Trust is key,” he emphasises. “If you want to go fast in a sports car, you need really good brakes. That’s what Microsoft and plugging into the Copilot universe gives us. Through that Microsoft-enabled ability to govern, we can move a lot faster.”
“So far, we’ve looked at personal productivity gains and they’re fantastic,” says Jon Grainger. “Copilot delivers a fantastic user experience, especially with Windows 11 and a new Microsoft Surface device.”
“Copilot meets lawyers in their workflow. That’s necessary to avoid ‘click drag’ or disruption to workflow, especially when we’re paying such clever people for their time,” he continues. “But there’s another level to our use of Copilot—and that is looking at Copilot through the lens of platform productivity.”
The extension of Copilot use across DWF’s data and application platforms will be key to driving further return on investment. Like many law firms, matter management and document storage solutions are crucial to daily work. DWF is in the process of migrating the document storage of these crucial line of business systems to SharePoint so that the data they hold can be securely exposed to Copilot, using all the data governance and security capabilities of the Microsoft platform.
“Data strategy eats AI culture for breakfast!” quips Jon Grainger. “With SharePoint Premium, we can OCR and index all those documents so they’re at the end of a Copilot prompt. We’re exposing more data to Copilot whilst Microsoft universal permissions are respected across the patch. It’s very powerful.”
DWF is pursuing a strategic approach, selecting best-of-breed software-as-a-service platforms in each functional sphere with the goal of pulling crucial information from those systems—including Finance, HR, and environmental reporting—into a Microsoft Fabric-powered data architecture. This will extend the scope of Copilot, making it possible for Copilot to securely interrogate a whole new raft of business information.
“This is another reason why Microsoft,” Jon Grainger emphasises. “Without everything sitting inside our lovely, curated Microsoft tenant, we’d need to worry about security, permissions, people seeing too much, segregation of data, etc. Copilot brings together a lot of technical strands for us.”
7 days’ work completed in 7 hours
The DWF team has closely monitored Copilot key performance indicators and use cases, reporting back monthly to the board. The business is very happy with the results to date. The time savings and productivity gains are impressive—but the big picture vision is even more important to DWF.
“You can always make the maths compelling when you have multiple people saving multiple minutes,” acknowledges Chris Stefani. “But I think we would have adopted Copilot anyway because it’s got so many other benefits. It’s all about modernising our service delivery and our colleagues and client experience. We’re not even at the tip of the iceberg in terms of use cases. That’s why Copilot is so exciting.”
“We’re actually changing people’s working lives,” agrees Jon Grainger. “Folks have come up to me to say, ‘You said you would do something and you’ve done it. And it’s incredible.’ As a technology team, we don’t often get that kind of feedback from our incredibly discerning lawyers. It feels great, as a team, to be delivering changes that people are so excited about and thankful for, because that’s not something that happens every day in IT.”
“As a business, we must look at not only the probable future scenarios but also the plausible future scenarios. The more of those plausible scenarios our technology can reach, the quicker we can pivot. That’s a fundamental business technology strategy,” Jon Grainger continues. “We need now to keep exploring AI in all areas to continue to deliver substantive change. It’s a privilege. People are very excited. It’s the biggest gift a CTO could ever wish for.”
“Yet, we are just at the bottom of the escalator—preparing ourselves for what’s to come. Copilot is a preview to the change AI will bring. By adopting Copilot, we’re getting experience on how to implement and automate the governance, the design thinking, the ethics, the security—all the things we need to think about very differently. We’re doing the organisational learning about what it takes to adopt a much higher order of AI in a highly regulated environment where the bar is very high. This firm-wide approach, taking everyone on that journey, is setting DWF up for future success. When the next AI wave comes, we will be ready. It will be so much harder for everyone else to get on at the next floor.”
Copilot is a massive efficiency tool.
Simon Murray, Partner and Head of Insurance Business Services, DWF
Follow Microsoft