Reed Smith turns to AI for lawyer staffing solution

AI is increasingly being embraced for workplace enhancements across every industry — and that includes the legal world. Pittsburgh-based global law firm Reed Smith has enlisted AI to facilitate resource management, improve employee engagement, and reduce imbalanced workloads among lawyers across the firm. The resulting Smart Resourcing earned Reed Smith a 2023 CIO 100 Award for innovation and IT leadership.

While well established in industries such as accounting, resource management is still relatively new for legal firms, says Aaron Pendlebury, director of the Smart Resourcing team at Reed Smith. The tool, which was envisioned to boost the relationship between partners and lawyers, was developed with a focus on making use of everyone’s skillset and improving productivity and efficiency across the firm. Smart Resourcing helps ensure associates are assigned with work that interests them and plays to their skills, helping to reduce turnover while improving engagement and retention of the firm’s lawyers.

Jon Oeler, director of digital transformation and head of the solutions development team, says the Smart Resourcing platform is a natural progression from the firm’s previous use of resource management, which included a mostly self-service model, along with an early stage full-service offering localized to a few specific offices. In developing Smart Resourcing, Oeler’s team and Pendlebury’s team joined forces to figure out how best to balance the two methods to create a stronger platform for allocating resources.

“We saw value in each [method] and really wanted to incorporate that into a total tool,” Oeler says. “So that’s where a lot of the analysis went, and that’s where the idea behind Smart Resourcing was born.”

While the platform’s use of AI has provided worthwhile dividends, Oeler says the firm doesn’t look at AI as a “pancea,” but rather as a tool to help solve business problems, and his team will continue to thoughtfully implement AI tools where it makes sense and can help humans be more efficient and productive.

Resource matchmaker

At the heart of Smart Resourcing is what Oeler calls a “predictive” model that relates “work to the people and the people back to the work.” Employees can input their skills, expertise, and knowledge into the platform and be matched with available projects that Smart Resourcing predicts they will be both suited for and interested in. For partners, the platform provides a way to quickly identify associates with the right skills for new projects.

In such a large, global organization, Smart Resourcing has also helped the firm feel smaller, connecting coworkers who may have never crossed paths otherwise.

Skillset, experience, bandwidth, and knowledge are among the key factors used by Smart Resourcing algorithm for matching purposes. To help improve this data, the platform prompts users with questions and suggestions about their experiences listed in their platform profiles. It asks employees about potential new skills as well, pulling from projects they’ve worked on in the past. Employees can amend, decline, or accept suggestions; they can also edit their profiles manually. With the algorithm working continually to improve its matchmaking abilities, Smart Resourcing now has around a 90% acceptance rate for skills suggested by the platform, Oeler says.

“When you start to combine all these data sources together, you start to look at the firm beyond the boundaries of the practice. We’ve been able to identify people in different practices, in different offices, in different geographical locations that have the exact profile [partners] need,” Pendlebury says. “I just don’t think we would be able to identify those opportunities or those individuals if we didn’t have a system with the data being wedded together in the way that the Smart Resourcing tool enables.”

Certainly not at the speed of Reed Smith’s business, which often involves pulling together teams at the last minute, while working against client deadlines — factors that greatly limit partners’ time for searching for associates. Smart Resourcing aims to automate this process. It also helps from a talent management perspective, as employees can flag if they are actively seeking work, will be away on vacation, or are too busy to take on new projects.

“It helps you get into the best place to start the conversation — who to speak to, who might be the best person for this opportunity or this deal,” Pendlebury says. “The fact that there is a human interface and element to this is the important part of how all of these systems in the firm work, none of them are standalone.”

The platform’s data can also help balance workloads across the firm — noting which teams or individuals are busiest, and who is available to take on more projects. Reed Smith leaders can objectively look at the data to identify nuances between offices to assess whether they may be under- or overstaffed. The platform can also be used to identify potential burnout and workload problems early, and to ensure the “equal allocation of work,” says Pendlebury.

Empowering employees to move their careers forward

Associates who have a lot of experience but aren’t busy with work often find themselves in that position because they haven’t developed a strong network in the company, Pendlebury says. Unable to find the right opportunities to exercise their skills, these employees run the risk of being disengaged without the right connections.

Smart Resourcing gives these employees the autonomy to build their networks by using the platform to identify the right people to speak with to build their caseloads or careers, or take on projects outside their typical scope.

Pendlebury points to an example in the Dallas office, where firm leaders identified an associate who felt underutilized. After talking to him and developing his skills profile, Smart Resourcing was able to connect that associate with a partner outside of his practice who was in search of someone with skills and experience that matched those of the Dallas employee. Without the Smart Resourcing tool, “you would have never naturally been able to draw the line between these two individuals,” he says.

“And by doing that we took an individual who was down at around 29% utilization and we’ve brought them up to just under 100% utilization today, which might otherwise not happen because those two individuals would never have naturally been able to find each other,” Pendlebury says.

Soham Panchamiya, an associate at Reed Smith Dubai, has used the platform to “get connected with associates in the global network who had capacity during exceptionally busy periods,” and feels he has gained “more visibility on junior resources’ capacity,” as well as the “opportunity to get involved in matters from the global offices,” which he says helps improve teamwork, grows internal relationships, and boosts networking opportunities.

“It helped me grow my network and experience different teams and ways of working. I’ve also had more opportunities to practice management and leadership skills in the delivery of complex client matters,” Panchamiya says.

To better balance workloads, Reed Smith leaders examine Smart Resourcing data at the practice level to ensure that there is low variance between the “most busy person to the least busy person,” taking it from roughly 50% to 20% since releasing the platform, Pendlebury says.

Moreover, Smart Resourcing has also helped reduce the common practice of partners turning to the same people they always do by giving them an easy way to source new help without adding a ton of work to their own plates.

And the speed with which the AI system can do this is a significant business benefit. Pendlebury points to the example of a large document review task that came in requiring a “small army of associates.” The partners were struggling to pull together a team because they were busy finalizing the deal. Using Smart Resourcing, they were able to bring together a team of 40 people within six hours — a task that would have taken a couple days to do manually.

Roxana Burghel, a Reed Smith associate in London, has noticed better work allocation across her team since the launch of Smart Resourcing, and she has gained more experience on projects that she was interested in, with partners she doesn’t typically work with, while also “getting assistance when I was at capacity to ensure we deliver for the client.”

Future goals for the platform include increasing the sophistication of data sources to improve the tool’s recommendations. Pendlebury’s team also plans to continue improving the user interface and user experience to maintain positive momentum on employee-adoption.

“Having a team that is focused on driving that change, and able to push those people that just need a little bit of help to get busy, is one of the success stories of having the Smart Resourcing tool,” Pendlebury says. “That’s where that ‘golden triangle’ of tech, people, and processes all come together.”