A&O Shearman’s Francesca Bennetts discusses her exciting work at the cutting edge of legal tech and her advice for young lawyers navigating a changing legal landscape
“I didn’t study law at university,” says Francesca Bennetts, partner at A&O Shearman, kicking off our interview ahead of her appearance at our upcoming virtual student event, ‘The Hybrid Lawyer: Where human expertise meets artificial intelligence’. Instead of law, Bennetts pursued an undergraduate degree in theology, which she “absolutely adored” and which helped her develop valuable skills in critical thinking and research. Still, law had always beckoned, so after graduating she took a one-year conversion course to qualify as a lawyer.
Bennetts ultimately chose Allen & Overy (now A&O Shearman) to start her career – and the deciding factor was the people. In her interview for a training contract, the conversation drifted onto an unlikely topic: kitchenware. “We ended up having a really in-depth discussion about the relative merits of Le Creuset versus different saucepans,” she laughs. “That personal touch made an impression. They just seemed very human and that made my decision for me. A&O really felt like the place for me,” she says.
Once at the firm, Bennetts’ first seat as a trainee proved a baptism of fire: derivatives and structured finance. “Coming from a theology background, I had absolutely no idea what derivatives would be,” she recalls. “It was full of complex commercial transactions and a whole new taxonomy to learn”. It was challenging, but her supervisor was David Wakeling – now head of the team Bennetts herself would later join — and the group’s innovative mindset quickly captured her imagination. The team, she noticed, was “very interested in thinking outside the box, leveraging technology and streamlining processes” even back then. That forward-thinking attitude resonated with her.
After trying seats in litigation and even an international secondment to Rome, Bennetts returned to the derivatives department to qualify, drawn by its mix of complexity and innovation. She spent the next few years working on major finance deals, while her team continued to test tech-driven ways of working.
That experimental ethos paid off when regulatory changes required repapering huge volumes of contracts. Bennetts’ team built a platform called MarginMatrix in partnership with Big Four player Deloitte to automate the process. “We built the tech infrastructure and provided the substantive legal advice and template amendment agreements, and then Deloitte helped with the outreach and repapering,” she explains. Using this approach, they helped eight clients update their contracts — rather than just one or two via the traditional manual approach.
“That really started triggering a thought that this could be a specific practice area,” Bennetts says. In its wake, the firm established the Markets Innovation Group (MIG) – a practice dedicated to tech-enabled legal solutions. Since then, the MIG has tackled projects such as the Brexit and LIBOR transition and grown substantially. Now she helps lead the group, which is focused firmly on generative AI. “How can we best use generative AI to make ourselves more efficient internally, but also to build solutions for clients?” Bennetts says, outlining MIG’s guiding question.
One answer has been the group’s flagship product, ContractMatrix, developed in collaboration with AI start-up Harvey and Microsoft. The tool enables users to open any legal document in Word and query it using generative AI. The twist, Bennetts explains, is that the AI’s answers are “grounded and benchmarked” against the user’s own data– so lawyers can instantly compare the AI results against their trusted precedents and extract reliable insights from documentation previously agreed.
It’s clear that A&O Shearman’s investment in innovation goes well beyond lip service. Early on, the firm’s senior leadership made generative AI a strategic priority. “We made a proactive decision that we wanted to be on the front foot on adoption rather than reactive,” notes Bennetts, adding that this approach saw A&O become the first law firm to roll out generative AI firmwide and develop its own tool with Harvey. “We’re not afraid to try things and see how they work,” she adds.
This culture of experimentation thrives on collaboration. “We can bridge the gap between law and tech,” Bennetts explains of her team’s close partnership with the firm’s developers. That approach has created an “unusual synergy” at the firm. “That two-way conversation is absolutely critical,” she says, ensuring tools like ContractMatrix are truly “built by lawyers for lawyers”.
Despite the firm’s strong tech focus, Bennetts reassures future lawyers that no one expects them to be coding experts. “We’re not expecting people to come into the firm who already know everything they need to know about using tech. That’s not a prerequisite,” she says. The firm provides extensive training and resources to help new joiners get comfortable with these tools. Junior lawyers are encouraged to use them (within sensible guardrails) and even offer feedback. “Provided you follow the rules, we really want you to use this tech and tell us how you’re using it, because we can learn from people coming through with new ideas,” Bennetts explains.
So, is the rise of AI changing what it means to be a junior lawyer? Bennetts believes core qualities remain the same – with one notable addition. “The only thing I would ask of someone coming into the firm is a willingness to try,” she says. Trainees are “already going to be bright and eager to learn” – the extra quality she looks for is “a curiosity about using technology”.
To illustrate how tech can enhance a lawyer’s role, Bennetts recounts a story from early in her career. As a teenager on work experience, she once spent hours manually comparing contract drafts because the firm hadn’t enabled Word’s track-changes feature. “It sounds insane to me now,” she laughs. But adopting new tools didn’t diminish the need for lawyerly skill. “I don’t think the advent of track changes has meant I’m a worse lawyer,” Bennetts says. “All it has done is taken the mechanics of finding the changes away… The crucial bit was actually analysing the impact of those changes”.
She sees AI in the same light. Tools like Harvey might “do some of the grunt work, which means we get to the critical thinking, analytical part of our tasks quicker”. But “for juniors, that’s a good thing because that’s the bit that you’re training for,” she adds. Of course, technology is “not yet at a stage where we can take an answer and assume it’s right”, so lawyers must still “critically assess the outputs and validate” what the AI produces. In other words, critical thinking and judgment remain as important as ever.
As we wrap up our discussion, I ask Bennetts for a highlight of her innovation journey. She fondly recalls an early “eureka” moment while beta-testing a Brexit contract automation. She and her team had coded complex logic into a template — then held their breath and “pressed the button” to generate the document. When the draft appeared on-screen, “it was like our firstborn child… the logic worked, the right provisions had dropped in,” she remembers, and the pride of that achievement has stayed with her. Since that moment, the MIG team at A&O Shearman has gone from strength to strength and has made a name for itself as a force driving AI adoption in the legal profession. Future lawyers, watch this space!
Francesca Bennets will be speaking on the panel at ‘The Hybrid Lawyer: Where human expertise meets artificial intelligence — with A&O Shearman’, a virtual event taking place on Monday 8 September. Apply now to attend
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