Another major law firm joins race to turn institutional knowledge into AI advantage

Major law firms are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to unlock decades of institutional knowledge, seeking a competitive advantage from information accumulated through thousands of client matters.

Jones Day joined that effort Monday, announcing a partnership with legal technology company Draftwise to connect transactional records, negotiated agreements and client histories through an AI platform called Ontonomi.

The initiative follows similar efforts by Kirkland & Ellis and other major firms, reflecting a shift in the legal industry's approach to AI from generating documents to extracting value from proprietary information.

Giles Elliott, Jones Day's global chair of AI and innovation, said the objective is to make institutional knowledge accumulated over decades immediately accessible to attorneys working on new transactions.

The technology relies on ontology, a structured framework that maps relationships among clients, transactions, legal provisions and outcomes. Rather than simply retrieving documents, it aims to identify patterns across thousands of matters that might otherwise remain buried in a firm's archives.

Jones Day has handled more than 3,000 M&A transactions collectively valued at $1.5 trillion over the past five years, according to the firm.

Richard Tromans, founder of the legal technology publication Artificial Lawyer, said law firms and corporate legal departments are increasingly recognizing that much of AI's potential value lies in their own accumulated knowledge.

"Much of the market is coming to the same point, which is that they realize the knowledge is within," Tromans said. "And how do they get it out?"

He said the underlying concept is not new. Law firms have maintained precedent banks and employed knowledge management professionals for decades. Generative AI, however, can identify connections across thousands of documents that conventional searches might miss. The implications could extend beyond efficiency.

Elliott said corporate clients could eventually incorporate transactional records from multiple outside law firms into a consolidated knowledge system.

"It's the client's intelligence, it's the client's data," he said.

Tromans said that possibility raises a broader question about whether corporate legal departments might eventually build their own centralized repositories of legal work product rather than rely on individual outside firms to manage that knowledge.

For now, Jones Day expects the technology to help attorneys identify relevant precedents and negotiating strategies more quickly, particularly in complex M&A and private equity transactions.

"I think it will make the deals much smoother and quicker to execute," Elliott said.