Transforming Legal Insight Delivery with AI – A Collaborative Pilot by Schoenherr and Simplexico

Andrei Salajan, Director Legal Tech and Innovation at Schoenherr, gives a walkthrough demo of the Class Action Navigator tool.

Overview

In today’s fast-evolving legal landscape, law firms are constantly seeking innovative ways to deliver expert insights to their clients effectively. Schoenherr, as a leading international law firm, is reimagining its publications’ platform for sharing curated content on key legal developments (https://www.schoenherr.eu/news/info-corners/).

Partnering with Simplexico, The Legal AI Consultancy, Schoenherr embarked on a pilot project leveraging Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance the delivery of legal insights. The objective was to make the firm’s legal expertise more accessible, user-friendly, and interactive. The project’s first use-case focused on the EU Class Action Directive, with the broader ambition of re-imaging the future of legal knowledge sharing.

Introduction to the EU Class Action Directive

The EU Class Action Directive (Directive (EU) 2020/1828) marks a significant shift in consumer protection across the European Union. Its primary aim is to empower consumers to collectively defend their rights through representative actions brought by qualified entities. This directive provides a structured legal framework that enables consumers to act jointly when their rights are infringed by businesses, such as in cases involving defective products or legal violations.

By introducing a collective action mechanism, the directive not only enhances consumer access to justice but also protects businesses from frivolous lawsuits, fostering a balanced and fair legal environment. Adopted in 2020, the directive requires all EU member states to transpose its provisions into national law by 2023.

For further details, the full text of the directive can be accessed here.

Why the EU Class Action Directive?

Schoenherr's decision to centre this project on the EU Class Action Directive was driven by two key factors: its significant legal impact and the high level of client interest.

In many CEE jurisdictions, the concept of collective action remains relatively new. The implementation of this directive is expected to significantly reshape the litigation landscape, particularly for businesses engaged in B2C operations. With an increased likelihood of high-value claims from consumers, companies will need to adopt robust litigation management strategies to mitigate potential risks.

As an international law firm with a strong presence in CEE, Schoenherr soon recognised the importance of this directive. Operating across 14 offices in Europe, the firm chose to focus on how the directive has been implemented in various CEE jurisdictions. By mapping the directive's adoption in each jurisdiction, Schoenherr could deliver valuable insights tailored to the specific needs of its clients.

The Challenge

Traditional legal insight sections on law firm websites often struggle to capture attention and engage readers. The digital age has transformed how legal professionals access information, with online legal databases and research tools taking centre stage. Recognising the rapid development of AI, Schoenherr identified an opportunity to explore how these innovations could enhance their legal insights section.

The challenge was to harness technology to make the EU Class Action Directive more engaging and accessible for clients. The goal was to move beyond static content and develop an interactive platform that would enable users to engage dynamically with Schoenherr's legal expertise.

The Solution

The advent of ChatGPT, Generative AI, and Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened up promising avenues for innovation in legal. Schoenherr and Simplexico joined forces to develop a bespoke LLM application using Azure AI Foundry. The application leverages Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to power a query engine. This engine taps into Schoenherr's curated legal insights, enabling users to access up-to-date, jurisdiction-specific information on the EU Class Action Directive using natural language queries.

The solution integrates expert insights from Schoenherr’s lawyers across various EU member states, creating a layered and nuanced understanding of the directive’s implementation. By combining AI with human expertise, the tool delivers accurate and contextually relevant responses to user queries.

To address common concerns around AI—such as the risk of hallucinations—the team prioritised transparency and traceability. Alongside machine-generated responses, users can view the human-written insights that underpin the AI’s output. This ensures that legal professionals can validate the information provided by the machine, as they can trace it back to the original content drafted by expert lawyers and the relevant articles of the EU directive.

Conclusion

This project demonstrates how AI can enhance the delivery of legal insights, making complex legal frameworks, such as the EU Class Action Directive, more accessible and actionable. By combining cutting-edge AI technologies with Schoenherr's deep legal expertise, the firm has created a new and dynamic resource for its clients. This pilot project and collaboration with an external AI service provider, serves as a model for how law firms can embrace AI to stay ahead in an increasingly digital world.

About the project team

At Schoenherr we firmly believe that technology has huge potential to drive new (legal) initiatives, change the way we deliver legal advice and contribute in a substantial supporting role to enhance the work of our legal professionals. This collaboration with Simplexico was another perfect example of how a technology partner can support, and together with legal-tech teams, drive an exciting project with diverse stakeholders across three domains: innovation (e.g. AI), legal tech & legal expertise. (Andrei Salajan, Director Legal Tech and Innovation)

The Schoenherr legal tech and digitalisation team was supported by project ambassador Martin Ebner (Partner) and our legal professionals across the participating jurisdictions in key roles delivering the legal content.

At Simplexico, we firmly believe that any AI solution should first be motivated by a well-defined problem. The implementation and evaluation of an AI solution must be guided by experts in the legal domain.

We like to think of AI as a way of capturing and scaling expertise. We were able to capture legal expertise around the EU Class Action Directive by crystallising tacit legal knowledge and expertise into well-structured and high-quality content primed for use with LLMs. We were then able to scale this legal expertise by using the content to drive a RAG-based LLM application so that users can dynamically access the legal expertise they need on demand. We deployed the solution onto Schoenherr’s Azure tenant to ensure that the data, application and AI components are all within the firm’s environment mitigating any concerns around data privacy and information security.

Law firms and legal teams have the legal skills, knowledge and expertise to deliver legal services. At Simplexico, we have the Legal AI expertise and a keen understanding of the legal domain to function as translators to realise opportunities for applying AI in legal in a practical and pragmatic way.

Need help with AI education, finding good use cases or developing bespoke AI solutions at your law firm or legal team? Let’s chat! Book a Discovery Call with us here.