AI shakes up in-house legal teams’ work practices - Financial Times

AI shakes up in-house legal teams’ work practices

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The writer is managing director of RSGI

Technology investor Prosus set its entire workforce a target late last year of building 30,000 AI agents.

It had announced an “AI-first strategy” in June 2025, investing in AI companies, but also using the technology in every part of its own business. Even so, AI use remained concentrated in its technology teams. The new challenge aimed to push all staff — such as accountants, salespeople and lawyers — to experiment with AI. In May 2026, Prosus said it had developed more than 60,000 agents.

Fabricio Bloisi, chief executive of the Amsterdam-listed company, also put eight hours over two consecutive days into the diaries of senior leaders, who were directed to sit with more junior colleagues and build a working tool in front of them.

“It was an intimidating experience,” says David Tudor, group general counsel at Prosus, who built a regulatory scanner tool. “I don’t have coding as a background, but it absolutely transformed my view, because even I could build something and publish it.”

Engaging senior leaders has been central to the legal team’s success in adopting and developing AI tools of its own. “It’s not the tone at the top, it’s behaviour — you need to walk the talk,” says Gitte Groenewold-Wong, head of group legal at Prosus. Senior lawyers learnt to vibe code — using AI to turn normal language instructions into code to build new tools — and have created their own AI agents or applications. Groenewold-Wong used Claude Code, AI company Anthropic’s coding tool, to create an app called “Who can sign what” to guide team members through approval processes.

The legal team of nearly 50 people eventually built 298 agents, which are shared on Toqan, Prosus’s AI platform.

Many legal teams featured in the 2026 FT Innovative Lawyers report for Europe are now using AI to build their own applications and agents.

Most innovative in-house legal teams — Europe 2026

WINNER: Repsol*

Adecco Group

ASML

CaixaBank

Carrefour Spain

Lloyds Banking Group

Prosus

Remote

Revolut

UBS

* “Winner” of the FT Innovative Lawyers award for “Most innovative in-house legal team in Europe”. Other organisations are listed alphabetically

At Remote, an international employment and payroll compliance business, lawyers are trained in software engineering. They have learnt how to write code and use software development tools, such as Cursor. This allows selected team members to help shape Remote’s compliance software products by contributing to new code as well as legal advice.

The whole legal team at Spanish energy group Repsol, winner of the FT’s “most innovative in-house legal team in Europe” award in 2026 (see panel), has undergone a transformation after it implemented both new technology and changes to the in-house lawyers’ work.

Focusing on people and skills was key for addressing the challenges involved. Pablo Blanco Pérez, Repsol general counsel since 2023, decided that his own team of almost 200 should have 100 hours a year for training on programming and AI after he learnt that was the allocation by some leading law firms for their lawyers. All Repsol lawyers now combine legal skills with expertise in process design, decision analytics and AI prompting.

Lawyers were also asked to change how they conceived their roles. The Repsol team framed this shift as moving from “I do the work” to “I design how work happens”.

Blanco Pérez says the Repsol legal team has measured the benefits of introducing new work practices and using AI. The value comes from achieving better analysis and quicker responses, he says. “Here, in the company, everyone is talking about the return on investment of AI, and I think we have proof of that in legal.” The team estimates it has saved more than 22,000 hours in the past year, and has cut external legal spending, including more than €360,000 on a single matter. The savings “exceed my investment in AI by multiples”, says Blanco Pérez.

At Prosus too, AI tools have changed the kind of work in-house lawyers take on. “Our team handles significantly higher volume and complexity than we could ever do without AI, without any increase in headcount,” says Groenewold-Wong.

UK-based fintech and digital bank Revolut has this year scrapped its old panels of law firms that it agreed to work with over a set period in favour of assessing a wider range on a quarterly basis. Initially driven by the company’s rapid growth in new products and markets, the move also reflects how AI is changing the work legal teams can do in-house and what they expect from outside lawyers.

AI allows the legal team to do more work in-house. “So the question becomes, as a purchaser and consumer of external legal advice: How do I need to spend the money, where do I need to spend it, and why,” says Tom Hambrett, chief legal officer at Revolut. He expects work sent to law firms to shift further: “We’ll see people outsourcing only the really niche, specialist expertise.”

The process of buying outside counsel incorporates AI too. Every request to instruct an outside law firm is assessed against three years of Revolut’s data on turnaround, quality and cost to suggest which law firms would be most suitable. The law firms are also scored on the technology they use, which means they must share with more transparency how they are using AI and the benefits that it delivers.

However, the goal is not to cut legal spending overall, says Hambrett. “Because of the growth trajectory we are currently on, we will spend more,” he says. The question is, “are we smart, and are we getting more from it?”

In-house teams: case studies

The nine sets of case studies showcased here highlight examples of the most innovative work achieved by in-house legal teams in Europe for their businesses.

All the case studies were researched, compiled and ranked by RSGI. “Winner” indicates that the organisation won an FT Innovative Lawyers Europe award for 2026. The top 10 in-house teams are listed above. In some cases, individuals are commended for particularly outstanding work.

Behavioural change

Standout

ASML: Winner

Originality: 9; Leadership: 9; Impact: 7; Total: 25

When standard policy and training proved ineffective at shifting staff behaviour, the Dutch semiconductor equipment-maker’s legal and compliance team partnered with behavioural scientists at four Netherlands universities.

Actual ASML problems were pitched to the academics, who tested interventions both in the lab and in the field, in collaboration with the corporate real estate, security, and business service departments as well as with the legal team.

The interventions have resulted in improved compliance across different areas of the business, and the programme has now become part of the long-term strategy of the legal and compliance team.

Highly commended

UBS

O: 7; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 22

In-house lawyers at the Swiss bank drove an AI transformation of the 1,200-person legal function, with a strong focus on leadership and communication.

The programme used different formats, including immersive events, interactive workshops, and even a “promptathon”, to engage potential AI users. Adoption of legal-AI reached 75 per cent within weeks.

Commended

Salesforce

O: 8; L: 7; I: 6; Total: 21

The EU legal team at the global software company assembled more than 80 AI-powered tools and prompts, enabling team members to find the right one for any task via Salesforce’s own Slack messaging channel.

DeepL

O: 6; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 20

A lawyer at the translation-tech company taught herself to use Claude Code, Anthropic’s coding tool, before coaching colleagues informally. The legal team reached more than 70 per cent adoption in six months, DeepL says.

Commended individual: Marija Stavric

Deutsche Telekom

O: 6; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 20

Competitive “promptathons” held by the German telecoms group’s legal team encourage lawyers to identify new areas for AI-generated efficiency gains.

Shell

O: 7; L: 7; I: 6; Total: 20

In-house lawyers at the oil major embedded generative AI into daily work with the help of in-house coaches, who studied each team’s processes and trained colleagues to start every task with the tools.

Mott MacDonald

O: 5; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 19

Lawyers held a “Black Mirror” workshop — named after the dystopian TV series — to encourage discussion on scenarios for legal services and risk management as part of the engineering consultancy’s wider AI enablement programme.

Santander

O: 5; L: 8; I: 6; Total: 19

The Spanish bank’s in-house legal team created two annual competitions — one rewarded legal thought leadership, while the other applied technology solutions — to connect and motivate a dispersed workforce of more than 1,500 lawyers worldwide.

Tüv Süd

O: 6; L: 7; I: 6; Total: 19

Lawyers at the German testing and certification company have improved integration between compliance and business teams through initiatives such as giving compliance staff secondments to business units and organising “compliance weeks”.

Commercial and strategic advice

Standout

Nasdaq: Winner

Originality: 8; Leadership: 8; Impact: 8; Total: 24

Europe-based lawyers in the US stock exchange’s legal team overcame obstacles when handling the sale and transfer in 2025 of its Nordic power derivatives clearing business to Euronext, the European stock market operator.

Euronext had previously accepted banks only as direct clearing members, while Nasdaq’s membership included utilities, municipalities and corporates. Nasdaq’s lawyers designed novel approaches to the transfer agreement and asset sale pricing mechanism as part of its complex wind-down framework.

The migration transferred all open interest — or outstanding contracts — from 85 members.

Highly commended

Lonza Group

O: 8; L: 8; I: 6; Total: 22

The Swiss pharmaceutical manufacturer’s chief legal officer Andreas Bohrer added public affairs to his mandate in July 2025.

Rather than setting up a new lobbying function, he works with ad hoc teams across the business on policy issues and has taken leadership roles in industry associations.

Moeve

O: 8; L: 8; I: 6; Total: 22

In-house lawyers drew up the contractual framework for the Spanish energy group’s planned €1bn Onuba green hydrogen plant in southern Spain. The framework is designed to cope with any future regulatory change and to add partners as the EU-backed project expands.

Roche Ukraine

O: 8; L: 8; I: 6; Total: 22

The legal team of the Swiss pharmaceutical company’s Ukraine division negotiated a deal with the country’s state procurement agency in 2025 that permits the localised final production and packaging of expensive cancer drugs in Ukraine. Roche is also providing equipment and training to enable the state to complete production and distribution.

Commended

Vodafone Ukraine

O: 6; L: 7; I: 8; Total: 21

The telecoms company’s in-house lawyers worked with regulators and industry representatives this year to implement the EU’s Roam Like at Home regulation, which now allows Ukrainian phone users in the EU to avoid roaming charges.

Aviva

O: 7; L: 8; I: 5; Total: 20

Lawyers at the UK insurer helped design an app providing quotes for home insurance inside ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot, while keeping regulated sales activity with Aviva.

Tokenovate

O: 7; L: 8; I: 5; Total: 20

Banks use separate systems to calculate interest-rate resets, creating discrepancies and delays in derivatives markets. UK-based fintech Tokenovate worked with industry body International Swaps and Derivatives Association to create shared software that automates calculations consistent with underlying contracts.

UNHCR

O: 8; L: 7; I: 5; Total: 20

The UN refugee agency’s legal affairs service, with law firm Clifford Chance, is developing guidelines on AI that are suitable for use by many parties, to safeguard data protection for displaced people in relation to AI.

Utility Warehouse

O: 6; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 20

Lawyers at the UK group, the trading arm of Telecom Plus, developed their M&A expertise to help complete the migration of broadband provider TalkTalk’s customers in-house.

Digital solutions

Standout

Prosus: Winner

Originality: 9; Leadership: 8; Impact: 8; Total: 25

The legal team at the Netherlands-based tech investment business has built and deployed around 300 AI agents to automate and speed up labour-intensive tasks.

A standout example is an intellectual property portal that connects to data repositories at five external law firms created after the team mapped IP data flows across the law firms and built scanners that provide real-time alerts on regulatory, IP and compliance issues.

The repositories, which hold information on the company’s intellectual property, can be accessed by a Prosus generative AI tool so that in-house lawyers can run infringement assessments and detect potential gaps in IP protection.

PPC Romania

O: 8; L: 9; I: 7; Total: 24

In-house lawyers at the Romanian arm of Greek energy utility PPC designed a platform that automates debt recovery litigation on a system serving 3mn customer accounts. The lawyers defined the rules for court selection, evidence checks and claim-templates driving the system, which produces court-ready claims within two minutes, and drafts replies to judges’ requests for clarification that lawyers validate before sending.

Highly commended

Talanx

O: 8; L: 7; I: 8; Total: 23

In-house lawyers at the German insurance group built AI agents that combed through software licensing contracts worth more than an estimated €100mn a year, to identify any that could not be stored on the cloud because of infrastructure requirements or location restrictions.

Procurement and IT colleagues could check contracts in the same shared workspace as lawyers.

ASML

O: 7; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 22

The Dutch semiconductor equipment maker’s legal and compliance team is introducing AI agents with different specialisms that collaboratively review low-risk contracts, flag tricky clauses to lawyers, and enable business teams to contract directly by themselves.

The system is not yet fully implemented, but time spent on low-risk contracts has already dropped significantly, according to the company.

DTek

O: 7; L: 7; I: 8; Total: 22

The legal team at Ukraine’s largest private energy supplier guided external IT developers in building an AI tool for generating documents, replacing the existing template-based tools. Drawing on a knowledge base of previous paperwork, it has cut the average draft time per document substantially.

Commended

Carlyle

O: 7; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 21

Lawyers at the private equity group have created an AI tool that cuts first-draft preparation time for pre-deal summary documents — financing grids — accelerating turnaround in competitive processes while ensuring consistency in applying internal credit standards.

Inflexion

O: 6; L: 7; I: 8; Total: 21

The private equity firm’s team of five lawyers has used general-purpose AI tools, such as ChatGPT and Claude, to develop applications that help screen potential investments, benchmark contractual terms, and manage outside counsel.

Adecco Group

O: 6; L: 8; I: 6; Total: 20

Lawyers at the Switzerland-based global recruitment company designed a platform that routes corporate and capital transactions through seven automated mandatory approval stages, replacing emailed forms and spreadsheet tracking.

Ilunion

O: 6; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 20

The Spanish social enterprise’s 30-strong legal team has created more than 20 AI agents, accessible via a centralised digital workspace, to help business units complete routine tasks independently and more efficiently.

Microsoft

O: 5; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 19

The US technology company’s legal team created a centralised inbox, or “front door”, for Emea business colleagues seeking legal guidance. AI helps to sort requests and answer common questions quickly, and lawyers step in when human judgment is essential.

New skills

Standout

Remote: Winner

Originality: 9; Leadership: 8; Impact: 8; Total: 25

The HR and payroll platform’s in-house legal team includes a group of lawyers who write source code for live products, before approval by the company’s engineers. The result of lawyers making updates at this earlier stage is that legal or regulatory changes are quickly notified and available to customers worldwide.

The team has implemented 20-plus changes, such as province-specific salary rules for Canada, which removed the need for customers to carry out manual workarounds.

Highly commended

ASML

O: 7; L: 9; I: 7; Total: 23

The Dutch semiconductor equipment-maker’s legal department restructured legal and compliance training to co-ordinate the previously fragmented efforts of specialist teams. The initiative, overseen by the company’s legal, regulatory and compliance specialists, has improved compliance awareness and risk management across the business.

Carrefour Spain

O: 7; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 23

Lawyers at the supermarket chain worked with both Spain’s IE University and a legal-AI company to design a three-month training programme for the entire legal team. Running from January to March 2026, modules included delivery of work, project management, innovation and leadership. Other parts of the Carrefour business have followed suit with their own IE programmes.

Prosus

O: 8; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 23

Rather than rely on off-the-shelf AI vendor tools, lawyers at the Dutch technology investor have learnt how to build their own versions using Prosus’s own system. Training includes a mandatory foundation in AI literacy, hands-on agent-building workshops, inspiration sessions and peer mentoring for complex projects. In-house lawyers can design legally informed AI agents and other software tools without knowing how to code.

Repsol

O: 8; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 23

Lawyers at the Spanish energy group averaged more than 100 hours of programming and AI training in 2025, including legal engineering — combined expertise in tech and the law — AI prompting, process design, decision analytics and legal project management, which enables them to build their own AI workflows.

Ilunion

O: 7; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 22

The legal team at the Spanish social enterprise, whose businesses include hotels and call centres and which prioritises employing people with disabilities, set out to boost its role. The strategy involved improving technological as well as legal knowhow, while maintaining Ilunion’s commitment to employees. The approach has been shared with other law firms and in-house teams.

Commended

Erste Group Bank

O: 7; L: 7; I: 6; Total: 20

After taking the lead in AI training across the wider business at the Austria-headquartered bank, the legal team has added new modules including how AI will affect mass litigation.

Deutsche Telekom

O: 7; L: 7; I: 5; Total: 19

Lawyers at the German telecoms group designed and taught most of a seven-week evening course at the University of Bonn on using AI for in-house legal work.

Operational transformation

Standout

Repsol: Winner

Originality: 8; Leadership: 9; Impact: 9; Total: 26

In-house lawyers at the Spanish energy group significantly progressed in 2025 in its deployment of a unified operating model to replace the patchwork of spreadsheets, emails and workflows formerly relied on by legal teams across 10 countries.

A six-strong “new law and digital” team runs the new model, which started out with a central platform for document, knowledge, and budget management that has now expanded to intellectual property, vendor management and investigations.

The legal team estimates that spending on legal tools halved in 2025. It says centralising approach to operational management is spreading across Repsol, with functions from HR to tax now replicating the model.

Carrefour Spain

O: 7; L: 8; I: 9; Total: 24

The legal team at the French supermarket chain’s Spanish arm has incorporated AI as part of its ongoing digital transformation. As well as implementing in-house tools, including AI agents for routine legal tasks, lawyers have created a self-service hub where employees find answers to common legal questions.

The team has also designed a dashboard to manage real estate contracts across the chain’s 200 hypermarkets and 1,500 supermarkets, enabling faster decisions on renewals, terminations and renegotiations.

Highly commended

Erste Group Bank

O: 7; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 23

The Austria-headquartered bank launched a legal digitalisation plan comprising four main initiatives, including contract automation and adoption of legal AI. Allocating leadership for each to offices outside Austria helped speed adoption and strengthened co-operation.

LVMH

O: 7; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 22

Lawyers at the luxury goods conglomerate deployed a legal-specific version of MaIA, the group’s in-house AI platform, and introduced Lexchange, a knowledge-sharing platform. The initiatives aim to accelerate AI adoption among the many legal teams overseeing the group’s portfolio of brands.

Shell

O: 6; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 22

The oil major’s in-house lawyers have restructured the legal team around business demand and risk.

Shifting non-legal tasks back to the business, using generative AI, and having lawyers “own” their cases from start to finish delivered a substantial cut in the department’s cost to the business, it says.

Commended

CaixaBank

O: 7; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 21

The Spanish bank’s legal team has modernised its approach through two initiatives. Pluton focuses on integrating AI agents to improve efficiency, while Polaris addresses how the legal team can adjust its operating model in order to minimise legal risk.

Baker Hughes

O: 5; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 20

The oilfield services group’s legal and compliance team organised its lawyers into groups aligned with business priorities, such as digital and AI enablement or dispute resolution. Spanning functions and geographies, the lawyers gain a deeper understanding of the business.

Lloyds Banking Group

O: 6; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 20

The bank’s legal team has introduced an agile management system, simplifying the team structure and using a bespoke app to track capacity. The outcome is better planning, including reduced reliance on short-term contract and seconded lawyers.

Servier Italia

O: 6; L: 8; I: 6; Total: 20

The two-lawyer legal team at the French pharmaceutical group’s Italian arm redesigned processes to embed legal advice at the start of business decisions.

Telstra International

O: 6; L: 8; I: 6; Total: 20

Lawyers at the Australia-headquartered telecoms company have built a new matter-management platform. An AI tool provides a feed of regulatory updates, allowing the platform to issue tailored updates to business units automatically.

Outside counsel management

Standout

Revolut: Winner

Originality: 9; Leadership: 9; Impact: 7; Total: 25

The UK-based fintech, newly licensed as a bank, has overhauled its outside counsel model, replacing its law firm panel with a system that will be based on performance by global, specialist and local law firms.

Under the new scheme, an AI system matches mandates as they arise to the best-suited law firm, which is determined by weighing experience on comparable cases, pricing competitiveness, and the level of legal tech adoption. Firms’ scores are continuously updated, with in-house lawyers supplying feedback on speed, responsiveness and costs when the work ends. The system also flags issues such as work expanding unexpectedly or poor billing practices.

Highly commended

UBS

O: 7; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 23

The Swiss bank’s legal team developed an AI tool for auditing law firm invoices, building on its recently established cost-cutting framework for outside counsel. The system draws on five years of billing data to check if suitably qualified lawyers spent an appropriate amount of time on tasks.

Iberdrola

O: 7; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 22

The Spanish energy company’s in-house team has developed a four-part scheme for working with its 450-plus external legal advisers. It comprises: data-driven framework agreements; policy research with universities and other organisations; knowledge-sharing with law firms; and a shared pro bono programme.

IBM

O: 7; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 22

The global tech company’s legal team has rationalised outside counsel spending, and reports that 90 per cent of matters are now billed through non-traditional, alternative fee arrangements. It has also set up a panel of alternative legal services providers, and is pushing for law firms and ALSPs to collaborate on responding jointly to IBM’s requests for work. The team recently convened a summit with senior leaders at all providers of outside counsel to that end.

Commended

ArcelorMittal and A&O Shearman

O: 7; L: 8; I: 6; Total: 21

Lawyers at the global steel producer worked with the law firm’s multidisciplinary market innovation group to trial legal-AI business Harvey’s “shared spaces” tool — used for securely sharing files and AI agents — on a live legal project before the platform’s official release.

Eon

O: 6; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 20

The legal operations team at the German energy group developed a firm-wide AI tool for extracting and formatting billing data from law firm invoices to support rebate and fee negotiations across its 10 panel firms.

Heineken

O: 6; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 20

The Netherlands-based brewer’s UK legal team ran a tender process designed to facilitate outcome-based law firm fees by disclosing granular data on volumes of legal work and challenges. The process led to the appointment of Pinsent Masons as its principal legal adviser.

National Grid Electricity Transmission and TLT

O: 6; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 20

Faced with handling an increase in land access requests to help upgrade the UK’s power grid, National Grid Electricity Transmission’s legal team worked with law firm TLT to build Property Front Door, a platform for allocating and managing high-volume instructions to its panel of law firms.

New products and services

Standout

HSBC: Winner

Originality: 8; Leadership: 8; Impact: 8; Total: 24

Lawyers in the UK-headquartered bank’s Global Payments Solutions arm shaped the design and launch of a service in 2025 that converts corporate clients’ deposits into digital tokens on HSBC’s private blockchain. The tokens enable instant transfers at any time in place of traditional settlement cycles that take up to two days.

The lawyers structured the service to make it compliant with regulatory permissions, drafted new customer models, and collaborated with legal teams in the UK, Luxembourg, Hong Kong and Singapore for its international launch.

Highly commended

Remote

O: 8; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 23

The HR and payroll platform’s legal team developed and launched a regulatory product called Compliance Watchtower. It alerts clients to changes in employment law and tax across more than 100 countries and provides recommended next steps for adhering to local laws and rules.

Commended

Aviva

O: 7; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 21

Lawyers at the UK insurer led on data protection and regulatory compliance for MyAviva Wellbeing, the latest version of a smartphone app service that provides corporate clients’ employees with digital healthcare services.

Eon

O: 7; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 21

Lawyers at the German energy group’s UK business advised on competition and regulatory aspects of its 2025 partnership with home-installation company Zuno, allowing households to buy solar panels, heat pumps and electric vehicle chargers online.

Inspired Education

O: 7; L: 7; I: 5; Total: 19

The legal team harnessed AI when it led a regulatory review of the education provider’s new programme for primary schools that uses the tech, ahead of an expected launch in seven jurisdictions from 2027.

Tokenovate

O: 7; L: 8; I: 4; Total: 19

Lawyers at the UK crypto fintech designed the Novat protocol, a tokenised settlement system that enables financial institutions to execute transactions instantly.

Revolut

O: 7; L: 7; I: 5; Total: 19

The UK-based fintech’s crypto assets legal team is participating in the UK Financial Conduct Authority’s regulatory consultation by trialling a sterling-denominated stablecoin, a cryptocurrency designed to maintain parity with sterling.

Sustainability

Standout

Lloyds Banking Group: Winner

O: 8; L: 9; I: 9; Total: 26

The banking group’s lawyers supported the £5mn extension in 2025 of Project Olaf, an initiative to redirect funds that are frozen because of suspected fraud towards projects designed to prevent it.

As well as devising ways to mitigate the risk of criminal liability for Lloyds for using frozen funds, the legal team designed governance and contract documentation, and led discussions with regulators and law enforcement agencies.

The additional £5mn funds initiatives such as the UK government’s Online Crime Centre, brings together state agencies and private-sector experts to fight cyber crime, as well as offering scam advice and awareness sessions provided by charity Age UK. The money brings the total delivered so far to £15mn. Rather than setting a blueprint for the industry in its current form, the initiative aims to show how frozen funds can be put to good use if and when an appropriate government scheme is created.

Highly commended

CaixaBank

O: 7; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 23

In-house lawyers at the Spanish bank worked with linguistic experts from the Royal Spanish Academy, the country’s official language gatekeeper, to simplify legalese in consumer documents. CaixaBank’s financial documentation for customers now complies with international accessibility standards.

The Ocean Cleanup

O: 7; L: 9; I: 7; Total: 23

In-house lawyers designed legal frameworks to scale up the Dutch non-profit’s pursuit of plastic-free rivers and oceans. Consolidated into a central templates database, the agreements are readily adaptable across jurisdictions.

UNHCR

O: 8; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 23

The UN refugee agency’s legal team helped to structure the Refugee Environmental Protection Fund, working with law firm DLA Piper and management consultancy Oliver Wyman.

The fund will deploy performance-linked capital to help support reforestation and clean-cooking initiatives in communities that host refugees.

The aim is for such projects to become self-sustaining through the issue of carbon credits.

Commended

International Fund for Agricultural Development

O: 7; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 21

Lawyers at the development finance agency supported the continued expansion of the UN’s sustainable bonds programme, with four new issuances in 2025 worth nearly $340mn in total.

Self-service tools

Standout

Adecco Group: Winner

Originality: 8; Leadership: 9; Impact: 8; Total: 25

In-house lawyers at the Switzerland-based recruitment group overhauled how company policies are written, stored and supported across operations in 60 countries.

The group legal team, which created a “policy architect” role for the task, cut its framework from 72 documents totalling 650 pages to 35 plain-language policies of no more than five pages each. These policies, covering all business functions, were organised into a single repository that employees can easily consult.

The legal team also supported the development of an AI assistant for the new initiative. It answers employees’ routine questions by referring to the policy documents and escalates more complex queries to the group’s lawyers.

Highly commended

Remote

O: 7; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 23

The HR and payroll company’s legal team, which receives more than 1,000 queries a month, built a system to direct client queries to specialist AI agents. If human intervention is needed, the system assigns tasks to Remote’s lawyers by analysing their availability and areas of expertise.

Unicef

O: 7; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 23

Lawyers at the UN Children’s Fund developed Unibot, an AI assistant that complements the organisation’s self-service knowledge platform to provide round-the-clock advice on routine matters directly to Unicef colleagues.

Utility Warehouse

O: 7; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 23

Lawyers at the UK group, the trading arm of Telecom Plus, built a self-service chatbot for commercial contracts entirely in-house. Users receive instant answers and approvals via messaging app Slack.

Commended

BetterMe

O: 7; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 21

The health coaching platform’s legal team built an AI tool to organise US Federal Trade Commission enforcement orders into a searchable database, enabling marketing and product teams to assess risks themselves.

Capi Money

O: 7; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 21

The general counsel at the UK-based cross-border payment fintech built AI tools to speed work across the business. Outcomes include a self-service contract review system that has cut approval times significantly.

Commended individual: Luke O’Leary

Repsol

O: 7; L: 8; I: 6; Total: 21

In-house lawyers at the Spanish energy group designed a due diligence platform to screen the thousands of third parties it works with and then continuously monitor their legal and regulatory compliance.

Shell

O: 7; L: 8; I: 6; Total: 21

Ethics and compliance lawyers at the oil major worked with the IT team to develop an AI tool to answer compliance questions from staff in more than 70 countries, with high-risk matters escalated to human advisers.

Trinetix

O: 6; L: 7; I: 8; Total: 21

The software consultancy’s legal team helped develop an AI agent, embedded in Microsoft Teams, that draws on vetted sources to handle about half of all routine compliance queries.