ArentFox Schiff Brings Its Institutional Knowledge into Legal AI
ArentFox Schiff is an Am Law 100 law firm with a long history of embracing technology to support its lawyers and clients. Its FoxAI framework brings together multiple AI tools and proprietary capabilities in an industry-focused approach to legal work.
As AI becomes increasingly available across the legal industry, the firm sees an important source of differentiation in something uniquely its own: the experience and expertise accumulated through its legal work.
DeepJudge makes that institutional intelligence accessible and ready to apply across search, analysis, and AI-powered workflows,without requiring the firm to create and maintain separate repositories of its data for every use case.
“I think every attorney is in a law firm because they want to work with colleagues who do other things, and that they can leverage their knowledge and experience, and they can work with these other smart people who have other expertise.”
The Challenge
Making Firm Expertise Available to AI
ArentFox Schiff believes that simply having access to AI will not distinguish one law firm from another. The opportunity lies in combining those capabilities with the legal expertise and historical knowledge unique to the firm.
But that intelligence is distributed across people, practices, matters, and years of legal work across the firm’s systems.
In a large firm, lawyers cannot always know which colleague has encountered a particular issue before, where the most relevant prior work resides, or what insights elsewhere in the organization could help with the matter in front of them.
“Once you get bigger than a couple of people, you can't stick your head out the window of your office and yell down the hall and touch all the other attorneys and get their expertise immediately.”
AI raises the stakes further. To produce work informed by the firm's own experience, AI needs access to relevant firm context. But creating separate collections of documents for different tools and use cases can duplicate sensitive data, leave repositories incomplete or out of date, and create additional governance considerations.
ArentFox Schiff needed an approach that could:
- Make Firm Knowledge Accessible: Help lawyers find relevant experience and prior work across the firm's existing data.
- Use Firm Context in AI: Make relevant firm information available and actionable to AI-powered analysis and workflows, not only traditional search.
- Work with Dynamic Data: Draw from the firm's evolving body of work rather than depending on static libraries that require continual manual maintenance
- Maintain Control of Sensitive Information: Keep firm and client data appropriately governed as the number of AI tools and use cases grows.
The Solution
Putting ArentFox Schiff’s Knowledge to Work with DeepJudge
DeepJudge gives ArentFox Schiff a way to make the intelligence contained in its documents and data available across different ways of working.
Search is an important part of that. DeepJudge enables lawyers to find relevant information across the firm's document management system, including work they may not have known existed.
But lawyers can also bring that information into chat, SuperSearch, and workflows, allowing relevant firm context to inform the task at hand.
“I think it's really important for us that DeepJudge sits really close to our documents and our data.”
DeepJudge also allows ArentFox Schiff to work dynamically with its existing data. Lawyers can analyze and filter information for new questions without requiring the firm to have anticipated every future use case and manually tagged documents in advance.
As new work is added to the firm's existing systems, it becomes part of the institutional intelligence available to lawyers, rather than requiring someone to continually curate and update a separate static library.
How ArentFox Schiff Uses DeepJudge
Find and Apply Relevant Firm Expertise
DeepJudge helps ArentFox Schiff lawyers find and apply relevant information across the firm's documents, making relevant firm context and prior work accessible when they need it.
That turns the firm's document management system from a place where work is primarily stored into institutional intelligence that can be actively used in day-to-day legal work.
“The first thing that obviously stood out for DeepJudge for us was the fact that you could actually find stuff in your document management system. For everyone who has struggles with their document management system, that's gold by itself.”
Ask New Questions of Existing Data
Not every question lawyers will eventually want to ask can be predicted when a document is created.
With DeepJudge, lawyers can analyze and filter information based on the question in front of them, without requiring the firm to have structured or tagged its entire historical document collection around that particular use case in advance.
That gives lawyers greater flexibility to put existing work to new uses as needs emerge—and creates opportunities to uncover useful information within the firm's documents that may not previously have been organized for discovery.
Discover and Expand Expertise Across the Firm
ArentFox Schiff works across practices to serve clients with a wide range of legal needs. Lawyers may not always know who elsewhere in the firm has encountered a particular issue, or what relevant experience already exists.
DeepJudge makes it possible to surface prior work and insights from across the firm. Workflows can also capture aspects of how an expert approaches a task, giving other lawyers a way to apply that experience within a repeatable process.
The result is another way to make specialized expertise available beyond the individual lawyer or practice who originally developed it.
Keeping Firm Data Current and Controlled
For ArentFox Schiff, making institutional knowledge useful to AI also requires thinking carefully about where the underlying data lives.
Static libraries and repositories require ongoing maintenance. As new work is created, someone has to remember to update them—and separate collections created for different AI applications can quickly diverge from the firm's actual knowledge.
DeepJudge helps ArentFox Schiff address an increasingly important governance challenge: avoiding unnecessary duplication of sensitive information across a growing AI ecosystem.
For a law firm entrusted with sensitive client information, control over that data is essential.
“Every time you have an AI tool, you're adding data and duplicating it all over the place. And I think there's a couple risks to that. One is that you may not be dealing with the best data.”
Together, these capabilities give ArentFox Schiff a way to put its institutional knowledge at the center of its evolving AI ecosystem without separating it from the systems where it already lives.
For Schulz, the goal is for lawyers to have a consistent way to access the firm’s collective intelligence as the tools around it continue to evolve.
“I'd really like DeepJudge to be the place where our attorneys know they can go to get what they're looking for.”
At a time when law firms increasingly have access to many of the same AI capabilities, ArentFox Schiff is building around something uniquely its own: its legal expertise, historical knowledge, and collective experience.
"DeepJudge is the API to your firm's knowledge."