Kirkland Spending $500M on own AI tech

Top comments · 7

• 26↑u/h0l0gramco
  They’re not developing their own AI. They’re buying infrastructure b/c they’re sick of being sold a solution that only solves as much ChatGPT.
• 12↑u/lukup
  To what end and for what purpose. Claude has just got $65 billion and all the other AI companies are also spending billions and billions of dollars in developing their own AI. Now a law firm is developing its own AI for what? It's like saying that just because a person has money, instead of using Microsoft Word or other word processing software, they start building and developing their own word processing software just because they can. Not really sure that's the best use of the money.
• 14↑u/Due-Meet6230
  TwatGPT
• 3↑u/Therapistsfor200
  I’ll be very interested in learning more about this where they intend to deploy this money. Fundamentally any big investment from a law firm will involve better training using their own historical data right? It’s hard to imagine how that ends up costing so much. Or— will they be developing their own tools like Harvey and legora (because this amount of money is in the neighborhood of what those companies have raised and way more than everybody else). I am skeptical a law firm - which has historically housed the last innovative humans in our economy- can produce a good software product. I think they’d be better off budgeting that money to mitigate the pain as they evolve their billing models
• 3↑u/TIanboz
  Currently an associate there- this is old news. We’ve been aware of in-house ai development since summer of 2024.
• 3↑u/zanderpants87
  Definitely thought this was Costco brand for a second
• 2↑u/ebubekir-kupe
  Im a lawyer and product owner whos been working in legaltech for a while. From what Ive observed so far, the core problem we need to focus on is the workflow itself of law firms, there are many of ai native legaltech tools in the market now, but actually integrating them into the specific workflow of a spesific law firm remains the biggest challenge. Every law firm has its own knowhow, workflow, sources and systems which means all those ai agents need to be tailored accordingly. If youre a biglaw firm with enough resources, it makes a lot more sense to invest those resources and funds into your own workflow rather than paying for harvey/legora etc. At the end of the day, both legora and harvey run on llm models, what they actually offer is just agentic workflows and infrastructure. Law firms at Kirkland's level can build something totally tailored to their workflow, and they can feed that system with the knowhow they already have, by creating db's company brains etc. I find that move from Kirkland pretty forward thinking, and it could make a real difference