Allen & Gledhill’s GenAI Breakthrough in Legal Workflows

Allen & Gledhill’s GenAI Breakthrough in Legal Workflows

Innovating More Efficient Work Processes with AI - How Allen & Gledhill is Cutting Costs and Strengthening Its Reputation

The future of business is being rewritten with GenAI. Stay ahead of the curve and register here to be part of IMDA’s GenAI initiatives.

Lengthy documents to review, manual processes that could not be automated, never-ending administrative paperwork – these have long been issues faced in the legal sector.

With Artificial Intelligence (AI) bursting on the scene, award-winning law firm Allen & Gledhill (A&G) wanted to utilise Generative AI (GenAI) as a means of augmenting the capabilities of their lawyers by automating some of the work processes. This leads to improved efficiency, allowing them to focus their efforts on value-added services for their clients.

Because of the sensitive nature of their data, A&G decided to join IMDA’s GenAI x Digital Leaders Programme, which empowers digital leaders to access the right expertise and resources to create a custom AI solution so that the Firm can explore new and powerful ways to leverage AI for their work.

Meet A&GEL: A&G’s custom GenAI chatbot
Meet A&GEL: A&G’s custom GenAI chatbot that streamlines legal work with smart features.

The Journey to AI

The team had two major considerations regarding off-the-shelf GenAI solutions before deciding on building a custom solution.

  1. Client confidentiality: Lawyers are legally bound to protect client confidentiality, as they handle sensitive and private information concerning their clients. This meant that their client documents had to be handled under strict controls and safeguards, thus ruling out off the shelf solutions which involved use of public LLMs provided through a cloud service.
  2. Accuracy of Public LLMs: It would have been extremely challenging for A&G to mitigate the challenge of factuality and accuracy of public LLMs without being in full control of the underpinnings and process of any LLM- based AI solution (e.g. ChatGPT).

Once the team did their own internal calculus and decided that a fully in-house and on-premise GenAI-powered solution was the way to go, IMDA recommended several suitable and credible vendors to A&G before the team eventually decided to work with Pand.AI.

Working together for an AI solution
Working together for an AI solution that targets real-world legal needs.

Consolidating over 100 use cases, A&G identified use cases with the greatest impact and had the highest likelihood of success and built a product around them.

Despite the initial challenges of optimising their LLM-powered solution, A&G fine-tuned its approach together with Pand.AI and found a way to introduce targeted and effective outputs through specialised modes or features that would enhance the quality of the model’s output. They also tested and evaluated various AI models such as Llama2, Phi-4, DeepSeek and Qwen 3.

“It was about striking the right balance. We had to resist the temptation to test out every new model that was being released and remain focused on ensuring our LLM catered to the specialised use cases that our Firm required,” says Tham Kok Leong, Partner and Head of Allen & Gledhill’s Technology & Corporate Intellectual Property Practice. Kok Leong goes on to emphasise that a core guiding principle the Firm adopted at the start of the project was encapsulated by the phrase “Always let subject matter experts be subject matter experts”.

He expands on this: “The AI solution we deploy has to augment the skill, expertise and experience each lawyer brings to the table in providing effective solutions to legal issues and cutting-edge legal advice for today’s demanding and complex business environments. It should also be optimised for generating outputs that are verifiable by our lawyers.”

Beyond working with the tech partners, A&G also ensured cross-functional collaboration with business users to ensure that the final product was aligned to real-life user needs. Technology lawyers in the firm also pitched into the firm’s AI journey by conducting briefing sessions to educate their colleagues on how to leverage GenAI.

The collaborative spirit in embracing AI culminated in an in-house GenAI-powered solution called A&GEL (pronounced as “Angel”), which is now able to help A&G staff with tasks such as reviewing contracts, translating contracts, generating new documents as well as generating advanced summaries for a wide range of use cases.

More Time Savings, More Potential Earnings with A&GEL

A&GEL was developed as part of the Firm’s broader digital transformation efforts and as a way to augment and support lawyers and business service staff by increasing their overall productivity. Some of the benefits observed during the initial testing of A&GEL include:

  • Greater efficiency when undertaking laborious tasks such as summarisation of legal documents etc.
  • User friendliness of the platform, requiring minimal training for the more basic prompts and queries.
  • Enhanced document search and management processes through GenAI automation. This project has also sparked the development of in-house applications by the firms’ IT team, to complement workflows associated with the use of A&GEL.

The firm’s deep learning experience in developing and using A&GEL has allowed them to position themselves as a thought leader analysing the law, digital innovations, and business trends that intersect with each other and what this means for different industries. This provides new market opportunities to service clients in the GenAI space or help them navigate this new paradigm, given a deeper understanding of GenAI.

Working on this project also helped grow A&G’s capabilities through knowledge transfer from Pand.AI.

“The impact of AI on the business world has been rapidly increasing and will only continue to grow as businesses leverage technology to optimise processes. Having significant in-house capabilities in AI will provide us with a clear understanding of its limits, usage, and potential security concerns. It will therefore continue to be an important part of our service and advice to clients, says Dr. Stanley Lai, S.C, Head of Allen & Gledhill’s Intellectual Property Practice and Co-Head of its Cybersecurity & Data Protection Practice.

Embracing GenAI as The Way Forward

Encouraged by the results of A&GEL, A&G sees GenAI continuing to play a transformative role in their firm. They will continue developing and customising AI solutions for more legal use cases and incorporate AI as an integral part of their toolkit driving smart, faster and more informed decision-making processes across the board.

“Lawyers who embrace AI would have a competitive edge over those who don't. We see AI adoption in A&G as a crucial step forward to better serve our clients and future-proof our growth in the years ahead.” says Jerry Koh, Managing Partner of Allen & Gledhill.

For teams who are thinking of embarking on a similar journey, Darren adds: “Take small steps and experiment with a small number of use cases so you can gain confidence for wider digital adoption. Most importantly, enjoy the learning experience!”

The future of business is being rewritten with GenAI. Stay ahead of the curve and register here to be part of IMDA’s GenAI initiatives.

The team behind A&GEL
The team behind A&GEL: Showing how legal firms can harness GenAI to stay ahead and future-proof their practice.

LAST UPDATED: 13 AUG 2025

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