A growing number of law firms are moving past off-the-shelf AI tools and into something closer to ownership: proprietary systems trained on their own lawyers. By collaborating with tech companies and forging academic partnerships, they’re starting to deploy technology that would have seemed implausible just a few years ago.
At the center of some of the most ambitious experimentation is Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease, a 375-attorney Ohio firm that has quietly become one of the legal industry's most closely watched AI laboratories.
Digital Versions of Real Attorneys
Vorys has partnered with Stanford Law School's AI research program (known as “liftlab”) to develop digital personas modeled on 19 of the firm's partners. Rather than training the tools on prior work product, each persona is constructed from hours-long interviews designed to capture an individual attorney's reasoning process, values, and professional philosophy. The idea is to replicate how a specific lawyer thinks, not merely what they produce
In practice, the tools function as AI chatbots that can draft responses and edit documents in a manner consistent with a particular partner's style. The testing phase produced concrete examples of this: one litigator drew on multiple partner personas to strengthen the legal theory in a U.S. Supreme Court amicus brief; an intellectual property attorney used the tool to interrogate a difficult section of a patent; associates used the editing function to receive simulated partner feedback before submitting drafts.
Vorys senior director of software, data and innovation Nate Jedinak described the experience as "almost like having a low-resolution map of the person's brain". Partner Scott Powell, initially doubtful, said the tool was "presenting results to queries that were shockingly sounding a lot like me" once he began using it. At the same time, firm leadership has been explicit that the personas are not a substitute for attorney judgment, and that human review remains a necessary step given the potential for AI errors.
Not everyone in the legal industry sees the persona model as the optimal path. Wayne Stacy, executive director of the Berkeley Center for Law Technology, acknowledged the novelty but argued that building AI workflows around the specific skills a task requires is ultimately more impactful than simulating individual attorney personalities. "The problem with personas, at too granular of a level, it glorifies the individual personality of a lawyer," Stacy said.
A Practice-Specific AI Platform
Alongside the persona project, Vorys has launched “AIV Labor,” an agentic generative AI product focused exclusively on labor and employment law. Where general-purpose tools often draw from broad or outdated sources, AIV Labor conducts real-time searches across nearly 500 federal, state, and local legal sources that Vorys's labor and employment attorneys have selected and vetted. The platform is built for both attorneys and HR professionals working through the increasingly complex terrain of employment compliance.
The platform is designed to process a question end-to-end — research, synthesize, and return an answer with next steps — and update as laws change. It currently covers federal law across all 50 states, with local jurisdictions expected to expand. The system operates within an ISO 27001-aligned security framework to protect sensitive data.
Vorys Managing Partner Michael Martz said that AIV Labor "has received praise from both internal and external users" and that the tool delivers meaningful value to both the legal and HR professionals who use it.
A Firm-Wide AI Strategy
The Vorys AI effort runs deeper than two headline products. The firm is a founding advisory member of Stanford's liftlab program, collaborating on research, tool development, and career training resources. It has also partnered with Ankar AI to build workflows for patent drafting, review, and analysis–freeing attorneys to concentrate on strategic, high-value work rather than process-heavy tasks. Internally, the firm has integrated Everlaw's document review platform with GenAI capabilities and trained the majority of its attorneys and paralegals on Lexis AI for legal research.
At the industry level, the competition is intensifying. Kirkland & Ellis announced plans this week to invest $500 million in proprietary AI technology built from its internal knowledge base. Cleary Gottlieb, Paul Weiss, and Davis Wright Tremaine are among the firms serving as founding advisers alongside Vorys at Stanford's liftlab. Dechert piloted a liftlab deal simulator with its summer associates last year, giving junior attorneys the opportunity to practice deal and deposition skills through AI before encountering them in live matters.
What Persists When AI Does the Work
Liftlab executive director Megan Ma has compared the current moment in legal AI to the arrival of TurboTax in the accounting industry — a development that clarified rather than eliminated the value of human expertise. "It wasn't like all the accountants were fleeing," Ma said. "It helped sharpen into focus when human expertise was needed instead of just the technology". The firms investing now are betting that competitive advantage will belong to those who figure out how to integrate AI without losing what clients actually pay for: judgment, relationships, and counsel that no platform can fully replicate.
