James Sutton, CEO and founder at Avantia Law, told Law360 Pulse in an interview Tuesday that his law firm's mission is to combine technology with legal services, and creating Ava supports that mission.
He said that the firm's in-house technology team spent about three years developing Ava, which integrates with Microsoft Office, and Avantia attorneys have been using Ava for about three months.
"The core opportunity for us is to use it to make our services — legal compliance, etc. — more than compete against traditional services providers," Sutton said.
Since technology developer OpenAI debuted its conversational bot ChatGPT in November 2022 showcasing the latest advances in generative AI, several law firms and legal tech companies have released their own generative AI tools. Some of the law firms that have built their own generative AI apps and assistants include Troutman Pepper Locke LLP, Dechert LLP, Davis Wright Tremaine LLP and Hogan Lovells.
AI agents are an emerging type of generative AI that can perform tasks with limited human interaction. Sutton said the main difference between AI agents and generative AI assistants is that AI agents can perform multiple tasks while generative AI assistants are more limited in their capabilities.
"The advantage of having an agent platform is it can work on a much broader range of problems for you," he said.
Ava is available for all of Avantia attorneys, staff and paralegals to use, and the firm provides them with ongoing training on how to use the platform, according to Sutton.
Currently, Avantia's legal staff has on average between 400 and 1,500 interactions with Ava per month, Sutton said.
Sutton noted that the biggest expense for developing Ava was hiring technology talent with AI backgrounds. Avantia has hired talent that worked on AI platforms for Bloomberg and BlackRock.
Sutton said the most challenging part about building Ava was figuring out what tasks to have the platform automate for Avantia attorneys and staff.
"The first big challenge we had was to map our business and work out what the most efficient bits of workflow to go after were where we thought the biggest wins were in terms of efficiency," he said. "It wasn't always the most obvious things that you think is the most efficient thing to do."
--Editing by Dave Trumbore.
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