DeepTalks with CMS Switzerland

CMS Switzerland Unlocks Institutional Intelligence with DeepJudge

CMS von Erlach Partners is a leading full-service law firm in Switzerland with more than 120 lawyers and tax experts and a total staff exceeding more than 200 employees.

With an 80-plus year history, CMS Switzerland serves clients from offices in Switzerland's main business centres, Zurich and Geneva. The firm’s experts advise Swiss and international companies, including multinationals, financial institutions, start-ups, government agencies, public utilities, entrepreneurs and individuals across all industries and fields of law.

The Challenge

For an elite firm like CMS Switzerland, the ability to deliver precise, precedent-backed advice is the cornerstone of its over 80-year legacy. Clients turn to CMS for sophisticated legal solutions that require both deep expertise and experience across complex cross-border matters.


With more than 200 professionals, CMS Switzerland has extensive institutional knowledge, ranging from contracts and case files to templates and presentations. However, this vast repository of information was historically fragmented across various systems and folders. While the data was available, legacy tools created significant search friction, forcing a reliance on manual navigation to locate specific precedents.


These technological limitations made it difficult for lawyers to consistently surface the firm’s best work and apply it across matters without disrupting their existing workflows. Furthermore, as a member of CMS—one of the world’s largest international law firms with over 7,200 lawyers—CMS Switzerland required a solution that could scale with the firm’s operational realities while meeting the most stringent data protection standards.


The firm needed a solution that could:


• Institutionalize Expertise: Move beyond individual knowledge silos so that every employee could access and apply the firm's total experience in their daily work.
• Accelerate Onboarding: Flatten the steep learning curve for new associates by providing an intuitive gateway to the firm’s historical “know-how.”
• Guarantee Data Security: Ensure all data remains secure to satisfy strict legal compliance and maintain client trust.

The Solution

DeepJudge provided CMS Switzerland with a scalable, legal-specific AI platform that transforms how the firm applies its institutional knowledge to legal practice. Built on a secure retrieval layer, DeepJudge surfaces relevant experience and knowledge across matters, clients, and time, while meeting the highest standards of security, privacy, and compliance.


Searching for Scenario-Specific Legal Provisions Across Documents

Key Strategic Benefits for CMS Switzerland:


• Instant Access to Collective Firm Knowledge: DeepJudge provides a single entry point to 80 years of collective experience. Because it understands the intent behind a lawyer's query, CMS Switzerland can ensure every team member is working with the firm’s highest-quality, most current information. DeepJudge transformed the firm’s prior work and passive data into an active, searchable foundation that supports legal decision-making. This allowed CMS to leverage its legacy of expertise as a tangible competitive advantage.
• Agentic AI Workflows Grounded in Context: High-stakes tasks are completed with total accuracy and full traceability. Every AI-generated insight comes with a direct link to the source document, providing the transparency that legal compliance demands.
• Secure Infrastructure: Data security is a top priority for CMS Switzerland. DeepJudge supports this with enterprise-grade security and SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certifications, meeting rigorous standards for data protection and access controls.

Specific Use Cases

CMS Switzerland has integrated DeepJudge as the primary access point to its institutional memory, moving from manual information retrieval to high-speed AI automation:

Instant Knowledge Retrieval

Instead of navigating fragmented folders in multiple sources, lawyers use natural language to surface relevant templates, past language, and presentations in seconds.

• The Impact: This eliminates the “starting from scratch” bottleneck. Whether looking for a specific clause negotiated years ago or a broad market-standard practice, DeepJudge surfaces the firm’s best and most relevant precedents instantly.

Agentic AI Workflows

CMS leverages DeepJudge AI Workflows to handle complex, multi-step tasks that previously required hours of manual effort.

• Streamlined Analysis: Teams use DeepJudge to compare complex documents and translate lengthy legal texts with high contextual accuracy within existing processes.
• Trusted Drafting: By using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), DeepJudge enables the firm to produce drafts grounded entirely in the firm’s verified internal sources, ensuring reliability and traceability.

Accelerated Professional Onboarding

DeepJudge allows new employees to navigate accumulated “know-how” more easily.

• The Impact: New hires become productive faster, gaining immediate access to the collective experience of the firm from day one.

The Results

Since implementing DeepJudge, CMS Switzerland has bridged the gap to its institutional knowledge and established a new standard for AI-driven operational excellence.

Exceptional Adoption and Engagement

DeepJudge has become a cornerstone of daily legal work at CMS Switzerland, with ongoing support and training to help CMS Switzerland evolve its use of AI over time. With its intuitive interface and reliable results, DeepJudge achieved immediate buy-in across the firm.

• 90% adoption rate among lawyers, with 105 out of 120 professionals actively utilizing DeepJudge.
• 80% weekly engagement, with monthly usage reaching 90% and continuing to trend upward.

Enhanced Client Service and Value

By drastically reducing the “search friction” associated with manual research, CMS Switzerland has streamlined its delivery of legal advice.

• Responsive Expertise: Lawyers can now respond to client inquiries with greater speed and confidence, backed by the firm’s total historical experience.


Optimized Associate Onboarding

DeepJudge has improved the “learning curve” challenge for new talent. By facilitating access to precedents, junior lawyers are empowered to perform high-value work earlier in their tenure.

• Faster Integration: New employees can independently navigate the firm’s legacy of expertise, accelerating onboarding and learning.
• Meaningful Work: Associates spend less time on repetitive retrieval tasks and more time on sophisticated legal analysis.

A Scalable Foundation for the Future

The partnership has successfully shifted how CMS Switzerland views its internal data, transforming it from a static archive into the backbone of its AI strategy.

• Strategic Success Factor: As AI becomes a client expectation, CMS Switzerland is positioned at the technological forefront.
• Reliable AI Output: By ensuring that internal data is searchable and traceable, DeepJudge provides the high-quality input necessary for the success of future generative AI initiatives.

Conclusion

The partnership between DeepJudge and CMS Switzerland demonstrates that the backbone of generative AI in the legal sector isn’t just the model—it’s the search. By empowering legal professionals to retrieve essential knowledge with unparalleled speed and accuracy, the firm has turned its 80-year legacy into a modern competitive differentiator.


As Dirk Spacek, Partner and Head of IT/IP at CMS Switzerland, puts it: “The efficient use of internal data in combination with AI will become the key success factor for modern law firms.” As CMS Switzerland pushes the boundaries of legal service delivery, the continued partnership will further evolve its AI capabilities, helping the firm stay at the forefront of innovation in an increasingly digital landscape.