Legau + CCA Law Firm

During a period of significant expansion, the firm (with 104 people) faced a critical decision: grow fast, with substantial risks and costs, or follow a more measured growth strategy, with an impact on revenue and profitability.

It is a dilemma common to growing firms: as they grow, the associated costs grow too, unless margins improve.

In 2021, when Legau's AI assistant did not yet exist, CCA adopted Legau's core product across the firm and saw productivity improvements. This first result showed that it was possible to grow fast and sustainably, without sacrificing one for the other.

Encouraged by that success, in April 2023 CCA's Corporate practice became the first in Portugal to adopt Legau's AI assistant, an add-on to the core product.

Most associates have built AI into their daily practice as support for tasks ranging from translation to gathering information and brainstorming. Together with the associates' critical and analytical skills, it forms a solid foundation for legal work.

The assistant's support builds confidence, with the certainty that help is available at any time, which translates into more autonomous work, better quality and fewer interruptions for senior lawyers.

The assistant sped up core processes, such as legal research and the drafting and review of documents, freeing up time for more strategic work. Lawyers also began handling court decisions in minutes, instead of spending hours reading through them to assess relevance.

With the assistant, lawyers ask for help drafting contracts, organising memoranda and presentations, and identifying negotiable points, negotiation arguments and open issues.

The time saved on preparatory tasks is redirected to legal analysis and decision-making.

For law firms, information security and confidentiality are a critical concern when using an AI assistant. And rightly so: many assistants use client information to train their models, which compromises one of the core ethical and legal duties of the legal profession.

At Legau, client information is not used to train the assistant. The infrastructure and protocols in place ensure that this information stays secure and private.