Now innovation advisor
A former PA at Shoosmiths has won a brand new car after building an AI agent that improved how the firm serves one of its longest-standing clients, without ever having written a line of code.
Joanne Bevan (pictured top) joined Shoosmiths 28 years ago as a secretary in the real estate team and is now one of the firm’s senior innovation advisors.
Bevan’s tool addressed a practical problem facing one of the firm’s high-street retail clients, which holds hundreds of leased properties, each governed by detailed contracts that must be handled under specific procedures. Following staff changes, newer lawyers were spending too long locating the right documents and guidance.
Bevan responded by helping create ‘structured SharePoint repository’ and building an agent on top of it, allowing lawyers to ask questions in plain English and retrieve what they needed quickly.
Bevan describes the tool as “just a simple retrieval agent” but says “it can’t be underestimated how powerful this can be.” The benefit, she explains, lies not only in the time saved but in the assurance that work is being done correctly and that staff are following the right process, which she says reassured the client.
Although she has never written code, Bevan was an early adopter when the firm began rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot, using it first for transcripts and drafting before moving on to building agents with the platform’s no-code tools. “I found it really, really easy to build agents,” she says, “but I’ve always been a bit of a techie.”
The agent won Shoosmiths’ internal client excellence competition, which Legal Cheek reported on earlier this year. The contest offered staff either a new car or £25,000 towards a house deposit for ideas that delivered measurable improvements to client service. The firm says the more significant outcome was the wider point it demonstrated — that good ideas can come from anyone in the business, and that solving problems with AI does not require an engineering background.
The win comes amid a run of AI activity at the firm.
Earlier this month Shoosmiths launched Project Apollo, an in-house contract review tool developed with Microsoft that marks up documents against the firm’s own dealmaking standards and, rather than operating as a “black box”, sets out the reasoning behind each change in the way a senior associate might explain edits to a partner. Both projects share a focus on helping junior lawyers learn rather than replacing them, and they come as the firm this week posted a record £80 million profit.