16-17 June 2027 – London, InterContinental O2 | Magazine
Co-Founder &
Head of Strategy
Factor Law
Co-Founder &
Head of Strategy
Factor Law
I would not describe it as a shift so much as a recognition of who we already were, and a more accurate way of describing the work.
Because we grew out of Axiom, we had sophisticated, well-credentialled lawyers and were already handling work that was more complex than the market often associated with managed services. It looked like New Law in one respect: the work was delivered at scale, with specialisation and a strong belief in technology enablement. But it looked like traditional law in another: it required real lawyering, judgement and a quality bar that had to match or exceed what clients could do in-house. Clients were not prepared to trade quality for a lower price.
Integrated Law became our way of describing that combination: the economies of scale and technology mindset associated with New Law; the expertise and emphasis on quality associated with traditional law; and the deep business integration and practical understanding associated with in-house legal.
The conviction came from seeing a significant gap in the market around work that is high-volume and business-critical, but too complex and variable for commodited models, too expensive to send wholesale to law firms, and not well served by standalone technology. We were not deciding to “go upmarket” so much as choosing to build unapologetically around the complex legal work at scale that clients were already trusting us to do.
The part I am proudest of is how early we recognised that generative AI would represent a structural change for legal, and that the answer could not simply be another piece of technology.
More than three years ago, just as generative AI was entering the industry’s consciousness, large corporate legal departments began coming to us with many of the same questions: Is this real or hype? Where will it have an impact? How should we govern it? Rather than treating each request as a separate consulting engagement, we brought those organisations together in what became the Sense Collective.
The Collective created a safe, peer-led environment in which legal leaders could share what was working, what was not and where the real challenges lay. It has since grown to include some of the most progressive legal teams in the world, including organisations such as Microsoft, HSBC, Intel and Meta.
What surprised me was the contrast between the speed at which the technology developed and the pace at which it was adopted. The primary bottleneck was not access to AI; it was activation. Lawyers are trained to challenge unsupported claims, work from precedent and protect against downside risk. Those are strengths, but they also mean that generic AI training or a handful of prompting tips will not create durable change.
That insight led to the creation of Factor’s Sensemaker Academy, which teaches AI through the context of lawyers’ actual work and practice areas. Participants do not simply learn what AI can do. They learn how to use it for substantive legal work, how to recognise its limits, and how to test and validate its output. We have now trained more than 4,000 lawyers.
I am proud that we have been able to move from helping legal leaders understand the issue, to building confidence and capability at scale, and now to helping teams turn individual AI use into supervised, repeatable systems and workflows.
Trust breaks down first in the gap between an answer that is technically correct and one that is practically right.
At the lower-complexity end of the spectrum – an NDA or a lightly negotiated document, for example – speed may be the right objective, and AI can do much of the work. But higher-value contracting depends on context: the client’s priorities, appetite for risk, relationship with the counterparty, negotiating history, tone and commercial reality.
An agent can follow a playbook and still get the job wrong. It can produce a legally defensible but commercially unworkable wall of redlines, escalate the wrong issue, or fail to recognise the judgement call that will ultimately make the deal work.
We see three layers to building trust.
The first is people and skills. Lawyers need to understand both the possibilities and the limits of AI, including how to validate its output, identify inaccuracies and recognise when human judgement is required.
The second is the organisation and its structures. Legal teams need to understand how ready they are, put in place governance that is protective without becoming paralyzing, and design an operating model that is genuinely optimised for AI-enabled work.
The third is the work itself. AI must be grounded in the organisation’s playbooks, decision logic, approval routes, previous negotiations and institutional knowledge. It must also provide sufficient explainability and incorporate human review wherever the risk or complexity requires it.
Factor can connect those three layers. Sensemaker Academy develops the skills and confidence of the people doing the work. The Sense Collective and our advisory work help legal leaders benchmark their readiness and develop the appropriate governance and operating model. FactorAI, combined with our managed-contracting teams, then applies the organisation’s context to live workflows.
The objective is not to remove the lawyer from complex legal work. It is to reduce cognitive load, improve the speed and quality of judgement, and create an AI-enabled system that lawyers, and their clients, can genuinely trust.
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