Kirkland & Ellis Bets $500M on Proprietary AI

Kirkland & Ellis, the world's highest-grossing law firm, announced a $500 million investment to build its own AI platform.

The Chicago-based firm revealed on May 28, 2026, that it plans to spend more than $100 million this year alone, with the remaining investment spread across the next three to four years. The firm will fund this entirely from its revenues, which reached a record $10.6 billion in 2025. The goal is to develop AI tools that Kirkland owns outright, rather than licensing technology available to every other firm in the market.

This move signals a major shift in how the largest law firms think about AI. Rather than buying access to the same tools as competitors, Kirkland is betting that owning proprietary technology will give it a durable edge in winning and handling complex legal work.

Building From the Inside

The platform is being developed by 180 technology professionals, including both Kirkland's internal engineers and data scientists and external technology companies. Those outside partners are contractually restricted from selling the technology to other law firms. Kirkland will own, or retain the right to own, all of the intellectual property produced.

The design process is drawing on input from 250 Kirkland lawyers, including 100 partners, who have shared detailed information about how they perform their work. The firm has not yet disclosed the names of the external technology partners or the platform itself, saying that information will be released in the coming weeks.

What the Platform Will Do

Unlike arrangements where lawyers turn to separate software programs for individual tasks, Kirkland's platform is intended to cover entire matters from start to finish. It will use the accumulated knowledge contributed by the firm's partners to provide AI assistance across a full scope of legal work.

Jon Ballis, Kirkland's chair, described the ambition clearly. "The idea is that we're going to take the collective intelligence of our institution and be able to deploy that throughout our firm," he told the Financial Times.

Ballis also drew a distinction between widely available AI tools and what Kirkland is building. He said that common tools were "raising the floor for everyone" in the legal industry, but that Kirkland had to go further because "we don't get hired for the floor."

Pricing Models Under Pressure

The investment also connects to a broader shift in how law firms charge for their work. AI is increasingly capable of automating tasks that have traditionally been billed by the hour, putting pressure on the billable hour model that has dominated legal services for decades.

Kirkland is already handling some matters under value-based pricing, where fees are tied to the outcome of work rather than the time spent on it. Ballis said this trend would accelerate. "People talk about the evolution of the billable hour," he said. "We already do a number of matters on value-based pricing, and that trend will only continue and it will accelerate."

How It Compares

Kirkland's approach differs from recent moves by other large firms. Freshfields, the UK-based firm, announced a deal with Anthropic in April 2026 under which tools developed through their collaboration can be sold to other law firms, including rivals. Kirkland's arrangement explicitly prevents that.

Other firms have also pursued proprietary builds. Simmons and Simmons developed Percy, an in-house generative AI platform, which reached 87 percent adoption among fee earners within a year of its late 2023 launch. Singapore firm Allen and Gledhill built A&GEL, a custom large language model platform hosted entirely on-premise to meet client confidentiality requirements. Dentons announced a partnership with OpenAI at the end of 2025 giving it early access to new models.

Across the wider market, Harvey and Legora remain the dominant third-party legal AI providers, with firms signing new deals with both companies on a near-weekly basis. However, some firms, including Sullivan and Cromwell, have faced scrutiny after AI-generated content contained errors. Sullivan and Cromwell told a US federal bankruptcy court last month that a major filing contained multiple AI hallucinations. Pinsent Masons was reprimanded by a London court last week for making false submissions based on AI output.

About Kirkland and Ellis

Kirkland and Ellis is a US-based international law firm headquartered in Chicago. It is the highest-grossing law firm in the world by revenue, reporting $10.6 billion in 2025. The firm operates across practices including private equity, restructuring, litigation, and corporate law, with offices in major financial and legal centers globally.