Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. The eight sets of case studies featured here showcase how law firms are innovating as businesses in Europe. They highlight how law firms are reinventing services and delivery models and changing how they manage their people.

Digital tools: legal work Standout Ashurst Perkins Coie: Winner Originality: 8; Leadership: 9; Impact: 8; Total: 25 Ashurst delivered Project Catalyst, a generative AI-powered regulatory analysis for an investment bank to launch a digital bank in the EU. Digital specialist lawyers designed a dual AI-model workflow: one mapped legislative provisions across 51 legislative sources; the other was briefed on the client’s business model and then extracted and categorised regulatory sources. High-risk outputs were flagged for human review.

The project, carried out in 2025, identified nearly 7,500 relevant regulatory obligations while also cutting fees substantially compared with a conventional manual approach. The information fed directly into the client’s own project management system for follow-up action by its legal and compliance teams. Freshfields O: 7; L: 8; I: 9; Total: 24 The firm developed a new AI document review approach for a continuing mass litigation claim in Germany.

The system built in a “human-on-the-loop” approach, where intervention occurs only if problems are flagged. Two AI systems looked for legal flaws in 180,000-plus documents supporting the claim, before an automatic comparison of the results. Lawyers then checked manually whenever both systems flagged a flaw or a disparity in results arose.

If neither identified a problem, intervention was deemed unnecessary. Overall review time shrank from an expected 300-plus days to under 50. Highly commended Pw C Tax & Legal, Spain O: 7; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 23 Since December 2025, the firm has deployed a generative AI platform designed to support clients whose documents are seized in unannounced raids by Spain’s competition regulator.

By enabling lawyers quickly to analyse thousands of documents for potential infringements, the platform accelerates efforts to construct a defence. Three Crowns O: 7; L: 9; I: 7; Total: 23 The arbitration-specialist firm deployed Anthropic’s AI coding agent Claude Code to enable its lawyers to build legal tools in-house, after special training and using strict data governance protocols. The firm then created tools to assist arbitration-specific tasks, and has modified open-source software to suit the firm’s needs.

Bird & Bird O: 7; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 22 The firm has launched Green Claims AI Scanner, a tool that scrapes clients’ marketing and other corporate material to analyse sustainability claims. Where content risks falling foul of the EU’s directive on greenwashing, which comes into effect in September 2026, the scanner flags the risks and suggests rewrites. Loyens & Loeff O: 7; L: 7; I: 8; Total: 22 The Dutch firm launched Med Lex AI, a system based on a database of 40,000 healthcare documents, in 2025 to enable its life-sciences lawyers to take on low-complexity work formerly deemed unprofitable.

Commended Cleveland & Co O: 6; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 20 The alternative law firm developed Reformat, a Microsoft Word add-on that automates legal document formatting. Since June 2025, it has been sold to other law firms and has more than 200 clients across Europe. The case studies were researched, compiled and ranked by RSGI. “Winner” indicates that the organisation won an FT Innovative Lawyers Europe award for 2026.