April 11, 2025
Across the legal industry, AI-enabled technology is presenting opportunities for enhanced efficiencies. As Torys explores ways of leveraging AI to improve the way we work, Chief Knowledge and Innovation Officer Sukesh Kamra and Senior associate Jessica Lumière spoke with Canadian Lawyer to reflect on some of the most important considerations when adopting new technologies in a law firm.
The real key to innovation, according to Sukesh, is creative problem-solving and prioritizing people and processes before the product itself.
“When you have lawyers [who] are open-minded like we have, then you can encourage them to help you find more efficient and effective ways to practise law,” says Sukesh. “It can be through project management, or better use of innovative technology, or just better ways to communicate internally.”
Taking a collaborative approach to innovation and understanding what legal professionals actually need is also crucially important—and it’s something Torys has been recognized for on a national scale. In 2024, Torys was awarded Best Use of Technology in a Law Firm by the Canadian Law Awards for its collaborative partnership between the firm’s Knowledge and Innovation team and the Competition Law practice group to create a first-ever advanced M&A analysis product.
“Instead of jumping to the solution and then trying to find what the pain point is,” Sukesh says, “we go to our people… and say, what are we trying to solve for here? Have we tried to solve for this in the past? And if we did, what did we learn so that we can improve on that?”
Once the goals and objectives are identified, the next step is determining whether a firm has the capabilities in-house to implement a solution, or whether they need to turn to an external vendor. At Torys, this means ensuring the highest levels of information security are in place.
“We work very closely with our risk management team as well as our information services team to ensure we have check-marked the boxes around information security and our strategy at the firm,” Sukesh says.
Piloting any new product internally is an essential stage to assess whether a product will integrate within the firm’s existing structures and workflows, Sukesh stresses. When so many products look promising on the surface, this stage will help determine which are truly practical and effective.
“You'll have a solution that looks great, and the demo looks really good… but does it work for us?” he says.
When it comes to garnering firm-wide support for a new tool, Jessica—who is based in Torys’ Legal Services Centre in Halifax—explains that the key is to show lawyers how this change will benefit them in a visible and tangible way, such as decreasing non-billable hours.
“We have to be able to sell it to the lawyers as something that is [to] their benefit, not the firm’s benefit,” she says.
This communication goes both ways, as it’s also important for lawyers to be able to provide their critical feedback during the pilot phase to evaluate whether the solution is actually working and meeting the key objectives. This also offers the firm a chance to refine a tool before launching it more broadly.
Torys will occasionally share its key findings during a pilot phase with clients, or even collaborate with clients to co-create tailored solutions for their organization. A perfect example of this is Torys’ Side Letter Management Tool, which won the Tech Innovation Award at the 2024 IFLR Americas Awards.
“Oftentimes, that means Jessica’s team and my team will work together very closely with the client to create that path and work hand in hand to create the solution, or frankly, just to provide our expertise on a pilot that we ran to say, here's what worked well and here’s what did not work well,” Sukesh says.
Currently, Torys leverages AI largely for the purposes of due diligence, contract analysis, and business productivity, but this could expand in the future as Sukesh and Jessica continue to monitor developments in generative AI.
“We haven't had that watershed moment of generative AI at this stage because every day, there’s a new large language model or a new use case,” Sukesh says. “The art of the possible is growing tremendously quickly.”
As the firm explores ways of further integrating AI into its workflows, accuracy and reliability are of the utmost importance, and AI’s outputs can be challenging to predict or explain than traditional machine learning.
“We have to be consistent in our advice,” Sukesh says, “and we have to be able to defend it. In other words, we have to be right in what we say to our clients. Generative AI… doesn’t always get it right… and to me, that’s the biggest obstacle.”
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