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.
“Clients hire law firms for their expertise—but law firms often underestimate their breadth and depth of existing knowledge and experience.”
The Challenge
For CMS Switzerland, delivering precise, precedent-backed advice is the cornerstone of its over 80-year legacy. Clients turn to CMS for sophisticated legal advice that requires 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. Historically, that knowledge was distributed across systems and folders, making it difficult for lawyers to know where to look for the right precedent or experience.
In a firm of our size, know-how often sits in a place where the next lawyer who needs access to it doesn't naturally look for it.”
As a member of CMS—one of the world’s largest international law firms with over 7,200 lawyers—CMS Switzerland saw an opportunity to make its accumulated experience accessible across the firm while meeting stringent requirements for security and data protection.
CMS Switzerland wanted to make that knowledge easy to access and apply across the firm:
- Make Firm Know-How Accessible: Help lawyers find and apply relevant experience regardless of where it was originally created or stored.
- Reduce Reliance on Individual Knowledge: Preserve and make available expertise that might otherwise remain with individual lawyers or teams.
- Accelerate Onboarding: Give new lawyers an intuitive way to learn from the firm’s accumulated experience and prior work.
- Protect Sensitive Information: Ensure all data remains secure to satisfy strict legal compliance and maintain client trust.
Having access to the know-how across the firm makes the value of our service higher, and that's ultimately what clients expect us to render.
The Solution
DeepJudge turns CMS Switzerland’s collective knowledge and experience into institutional intelligence lawyers can find, analyze, and put to work.
DeepJudge gives legal professionals a way to work with knowledge across the firm—finding relevant prior work, analyzing it in context, and applying what the firm already knows to the matter at hand.
This is particularly valuable when lawyers know the firm has handled a similar issue before but don't know where that experience resides.
There are certain instances where lawyers know that there has been a precedent or they had a similar case, but they don't know where to look for it—and DeepJudge finds it for them.
Key Strategic Benefits for CMS Switzerland
- Put Collective Experience to Work: Lawyers can find, analyze, and apply relevant prior matters, precedents, work product, and expertise across the organization.
- Firm Context from the Start: Existing firm knowledge gives lawyers a head start on new matters instead of forcing them to begin from scratch.
- AI Grounded in CMS Knowledge: Lawyers can work with AI informed by the firm's own experience and prior work—not simply generic knowledge.
- Secure, Permission-Aware Access: DeepJudge maintains existing access controls while meeting enterprise requirements for security, privacy, and compliance.
How CMS Uses DeepJudge
Find, Analyze, and Apply Relevant Precedent
Lawyers use DeepJudge to identify relevant work from previous matters, understand how the firm has approached similar issues, and apply that experience to new matters, giving them a head start rather than starting from a blank page.
It’s really . . . a jump start at the beginning of a new case.
Elevate the Next Generation of Lawyers
DeepJudge gives junior lawyers direct access to the precedent, approaches, and experience accumulated across the firm. That allows them to learn from how CMS Switzerland has handled similar work and bring institutional knowledge into their own analysis from the start.
For CMS Switzerland, AI is part of equipping a new generation of lawyers to learn from firm experience and contribute to a future-facing practice.
I think we need more young people. We need tech-savvy people, and with them we can develop a future-facing law firm.
Ground AI in CMS Switzerland’s Own Knowledge
As AI becomes increasingly capable, CMS Switzerland sees an important distinction between access to general legal AI capabilities and access to AI informed by the knowledge that makes a particular firm different.
For Roxana Sharifi, that raises a fundamental question for law firms adopting AI:
How do you want to actually differentiate from your colleagues? [I]n the past . . . you could defend to your client that this is a successful submission because you know you've done that before and you've succeeded. The only way to retrieve that is not through using any general large language model but to have a platform that allows you to access your own firm's knowledge.
DeepJudge enables lawyers to work with AI grounded in the firm's own prior work, precedent, and experience.
You will receive an output that is grounded and based in your own firm's knowledge, which will raise the level of quality of your output.
The Results
Since implementing DeepJudge, CMS Switzerland has made its institutional knowledge accessible across the firm—helping lawyers find relevant experience and put it to work on new matters.
1. Exceptional Adoption and Engagement
DeepJudge has become a cornerstone of daily legal work at CMS Switzerland, supported by ongoing collaboration and training as the firm continues to expand how it uses AI.
- 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.
2. Institutional Knowledge in Action
Lawyers can draw on relevant prior work and firm experience as they approach new matters, turning knowledge that once sat across systems and teams into a resource for active legal work.
The time savings can be substantial: “People can save days,” according to Sharifi.
More importantly, lawyers can begin new matters with relevant firm experience already at hand.
3. Client Value Through Firmwide Knowledge
For CMS Switzerland, making institutional knowledge usable isn't simply about efficiency. It directly supports the quality and value of the firm's legal service.
Lawyers can draw on a broader body of firm experience and apply approaches and precedents from prior matters to the work in front of them.
Having access to the know-how across the firm makes the value of our service higher, and that's ultimately what clients expect us to render.
4. A Foundation for Differentiation in the Age of AI
As capable AI becomes widely available, CMS Switzerland sees its own accumulated knowledge and experience as an important source of differentiation.
The question is no longer simply whether a law firm uses AI, but how it combines AI with the precedent, experience, and know-how unique to the organization.
I think firms that have succeeded will be the ones who have a realistic understanding of what AI can do and what it can't do.
Built Through Collaboration
CMS Switzerland's use of DeepJudge has continued to develop alongside the firm's needs. The relationship has gone beyond implementing technology to an ongoing collaboration around how institutional knowledge can best support lawyers and their clients.
DeepJudge is a very accessible organization that listens to law firms, and together we were able to develop and shape the tool to the benefit of us, DeepJudge, and ultimately our clients.
At a moment when law firms have access to many of the same capable AI models, CMS Switzerland is building on something uniquely its own: the knowledge and experience created through its legal work.
DeepJudge makes that institutional knowledge accessible to lawyers and AI, so CMS Switzerland can build on what it already knows and put that experience to work for clients.