News You Can Use

Edition 26 · 15th - 30th Sep 2025

News You Can Use

Deep Dives

Three stories worth sitting with

FT Innovative Lawyers: Europe 2025 -- report and winners

FT Innovative Lawyers: Europe 2025 -- report and winners

What
Addleshaw Goddard is ranked among the Top 10 Most Innovative Law Firms in Europe (8th), marking our sixth consecutive year on the list. This year, AG was Highly Commended in the Automation and AI Tools category for the RAG report, and Commended in Strategic Direction and Science & Technology.
So what
Some big projects stood out from across all law firms, with Freshfields ranking 1st overall. Interest was drawn to more Legal Tech Consultancy work, the rise of data science, discussions around the business model in law and specific products being created for clients. Interestingly, Simmons & Simmons won the Automation in AI Category with 'Percy' a very similar tool to AGPT.

Benchmarking Humans & AI in Contract Drafting -- Preliminary Findings

Benchmarking Humans & AI in Contract Drafting -- Preliminary Findings

What
LegalBenchmarks' latest study tested 13 AI platforms alongside a group of in-house lawyers, scoring outputs on reliability, usefulness, and workflow support. The results show that AI is increasingly capable of producing reliable first drafts. Some models even outperformed top lawyers on certain reliability metrics.
So what
This highlights that hybrid approaches are now the most practical way to work: AI can take on the bulk of routine drafting, while lawyers provide critical oversight, commercial context, and final judgment.

GDPval - Evaluating AI on real-world tasks

GDPval - Evaluating AI on real-world tasks

What
OpenAI has introduced GDPval, a new benchmark designed to test how well AI models perform tasks that matter in the real world. GDPval covers 44 occupations across nine sectors with tasks such as legal briefs, slide decks, reports, spreadsheets, etc.
So what
This matters a lot for us because GDPval gives a more grounded way to measure how capable AI is in assisting with real legal work. This is very similar to our AI Benchmarking work in R&D and we can learn a lot from this structured approach.

Worth Reading

Everything else worth a click

Databricks - Building Enterprise Agents 90x Cheaper

Databricks shows open-source gpt-oss-120b plus automated prompt optimisation (GEPA) beating Claude Sonnet 4 and Opus 4.1 at ~90x lower serving cost. Meaningful signal on the economics of open-model enterprise agents.

Wordsmith - Is Bureaucracy Killing UK Growth?

Wordsmith's argument that regulatory and administrative load is now a primary drag on UK growth, and legal AI is part of the answer. Political piece but a useful read for UK-focused conversations.

BigHand - 2025 Legal Pricing and Budgeting Report

Annual pricing report. 50% of firms see rising transparency demands from clients, only 34% have updated pricing to reflect AI efficiencies, and structured matter budgeting delivers ~9% higher realisation.

GDPeval - Evaluating AI on Real-World Tasks (PDF)

[Internal AG resource] OpenAI's GDPval benchmark covering 44 occupations across 9 sectors with realistic deliverables. Close to the R&D benchmarking approach and worth learning from.

How People Use ChatGPT (PDF)

[Internal AG resource] Research on real-world ChatGPT usage patterns - task types, length, sector breakdown. Useful for calibrating internal training and adoption programmes.

ILTA 2025 Technology Survey - Executive Summary (PDF)

[Internal AG resource] ILTA's annual tech survey exec summary. Reliable cross-firm reference for technology spend, adoption and priorities.

Stanford Law Unveils Liftlab

Legal Innovation through Frontier Technology Lab, led by Julian Nyarko and Megan Ma. Combines academic research with firm-vendor collaboration to explore how AI reshapes legal practice and access to justice.