Saloua Ouchan - Freshfields Is Not Betting on One AI Vendor

Freshfields did not buy a legal AI tool. It built a toolkit around all of them.

Saloua Ouchan is a partner at Freshfields in Amsterdam and co-head of the firm’s AI efforts. Freshfields has had its own lab since 2019, where lawyers, data scientists and machine learning experts build tools together, and it develops them with both Anthropic and Google. Every lawyer gets their own AI toolkit with a dropdown of the major models and a set of skills for recurring tasks. The firm will never build its own LLM. What it keeps for itself is two centuries of accumulated knowledge from cross-border deals.

That shifts the pressure to the junior lawyers. The data crunching that used to train them is disappearing, and polished AI output makes it easy to hand in work nobody has thought through. Ouchan explains why the apprentice model matters more now, and what she does when a junior can’t explain their own due diligence report.

She also covers what clients ask about confidentiality, why the billable hour is not dead yet, how internal leaderboards changed the culture, and why she thinks the Jevons paradox means more work for lawyers, not less.

You’ll learn

• Why Freshfields chose a vendor agnostic toolkit over a single legal AI subscription
• How skills replace prompting for tasks you perform ten times a week
• Why juniors are hit harder by AI than partners, and how the apprentice model adapts
• Why critical thinking matters more when the output looks this convincing
• How due diligence can be priced in three tiers, from fully automated to a full lawyer check
• What tracking AI use per client matter means for future billing models
• Why AI could unlock latent demand for legal services

Chapters

00:00 Introduction

00:55 Freshfields’ own AI toolkit

01:40 A vendor agnostic choice of models

03:13 From prompting to skills

04:16 How AI changes the work of a partner

05:10 Are juniors losing their training ground?

07:03 The apprentice model when the groundwork is automated

09:24 Don’t be fooled by well written AI output

10:29 Building in house instead of buying a tool

12:35 What clients ask about AI and confidentiality

15:06 Is the billable hour disappearing?

16:04 Three flavours of AI due diligence

17:28 Pricing a product instead of writing down time

19:04 Co-creating with Anthropic and Google

21:09 New roles inside the law firm

21:43 Why Freshfields did not rush to the press

23:30 Lawyers and technologists in one room

24:07 Clients inside the lab

24:52 Leaderboards and making AI fun

27:37 Will young lawyers still have a job?

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