What difference in half a billion dollars?
Back in May '26 Kirkland & Ellis announced a $500m investment over the next 3-4 years to build a proprietary AI platform based around its own knowledge base and in partnership with Palantir Technologies, and then embed that within various client workflows
In August '26, I was struck by Thomson Reuters announcing that they had spent $40m using an open source model applied to Westlaw, Practical Law and so on
At 10,000 ft it was the gulf between those numbers that caught my eye, particularly given that both are framing this as of strategic importance and both are circling a similar problem of how to reduce dependence on the AI big boys and better control/leverage their own data
TR has ~$8b in revenue and K&E has ~$10b - so I don't think is a case of cutting one's cloth, they are not dissimilar in size. I also don't think one being a law firm and one being a tech company explains the difference
Many tactical questions spring to mind, such as:
- Is K&E going to develop something 12x better (whatever 'better' means)?
- Is the increased cost because of 'AI embedded workflows' (whatever that means!)?
- Are we to infer that it's $50m to build a thing and then $450m to embed a thing?
- Has K&E got a bucket load of data remediation work to do that TR did not?
- Is TR shunting the best part of half a billion $ of change management effort onto clients?
But stepping back from the cynical specifics, for the first time in my career it does feel like different firms are pursuing materially different approaches when it comes to GenAI
Historically, it appears to me most firms defaulted to buy rather than build for any given problem, and they bought from 2 or 3 legal tech vendors (and then complained about the commercials!)
Whilst we've certainly started there this time round, we are currently seeing more nuanced consideration of build vs buy (or both) and, as the TR vs K&E example illustrates, greater gradation in what exactly is being built in each case. There's also a whole host of interesting things happening in smaller firms that aren't throwing 8 or 9 figure sums at the problem
I'm sure my typical cynicism will return in future posts, but for now I would express excitement and optimism that firms genuinely appear to be engaging with this at a deeper level than in previous innovation/tech waves
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