ML One AI: Generative Artificial Intelligence driving legal innovation
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ABOUT THIS SUCCESS STORY
Over several decades, Morais Leitão accumulated extensive specialist legal knowledge within its internal knowledge base and digital library. This highly strategic intellectual capital represented a significant competitive advantage, but new ways of accessing, connecting and reusing the information were needed to maximize its potential.
SOLUTION SCOPE
- Legal knowledge management
- Generative Artificial Intelligence
- Intelligent document archive search
- Integration with iManage
- Document processing and indexing
- Conversational user experience
- AI-assisted web search
Challenge: making decades of legal knowledge more accessible
Morais Leitão had a document archive containing more than two decades of information, organized across different areas of expertise. These sources included articles, publications, digitized content, templates, legal submissions and other documents produced internally by lawyers and legal professionals.
A significant amount of this information was stored in iManage, a platform widely used in the legal sector for document and knowledge management. However, despite centralizing relevant documents, the platform did not provide intelligent natural-language search or allow users to explore information contextually through AI.
The challenge was clear: how could this accumulated knowledge be transformed into a truly strategic asset for legal teams without compromising data security, information confidentiality or cost control?
The complexity of the challenge was heightened by three main factors:
Volume of information
The archive contained many gigabytes of data and thousands of documents accumulated over several decades.
Different types of sources
Not all documents could be treated in the same way. Library materials, such as articles or book excerpts, could provide a factual basis for an answer, while templates and working documents required a different approach, focused more on recommendations and contextualization.
Sensitive data and internal control
As a law firm, Morais Leitão needed to ensure that information remained within a controlled environment, preventing sensitive data from being exposed to external tools without appropriate governance.
To address this challenge, Xpand IT developed ML One AI, a generative artificial intelligence solution designed to transform this accumulated knowledge into an intelligent and secure assistant, tailored to the needs of a leading law firm.
Rather than simply creating a search tool, the goal was to build an innovative conversational experience that could help users find relevant information, consult different knowledge sources and work more efficiently with internal documentation, while retaining control over sensitive data and usage costs.
Solution: a pioneering Generative AI assistant for the Portuguese legal sector
Xpand IT developed ML One AI, an intelligent assistant that enables lawyers and legal professionals to interact with Morais Leitão’s accumulated knowledge through an intuitive conversational experience, bringing technology closer to the natural way legal professionals think and work.
The solution was designed to integrate different sources of information and allow users to search, ask questions and explore internal knowledge more naturally. Within the portal, users have access to a chat area, a conversation history and a source selector that allows them to choose where they want to search, including the library, the internal knowledge base or the web.
Behind this experience, Xpand IT created an indexing process capable of processing the existing volume of documentation in iManage and generating an AI-ready knowledge base. This process required parallelization strategies, batch processing, resilience, telemetry and fault tolerance, ensuring that indexing could take place in a controlled manner without overloading the document management platform.
One of the solution’s key differentiators was the way Xpand IT handled different types of information. Factual documents, such as articles or excerpts from legal publications, could be used as a basis for AI-generated answers. Documents such as templates, legal submissions and working materials, however, could not be used in the same way, as they represent examples, models or internal precedents rather than universally applicable factual sources.
To address this distinction, the solution was designed to recommend relevant documents whenever the AI identifies useful information within these sources. Instead of generating an answer directly from a template, the assistant presents the document to the user, who can then add it to the context of the conversation.
In this way, the tool supports legal research and legal work while preserving the distinction between factual knowledge and supporting documentation.
Xpand IT was also responsible for the user experience, ensuring that the technical complexity of the solution was translated into a simple, intuitive interface tailored to the daily needs of legal teams.
“With ML One AI, our lawyers can now interact in natural language with the legal knowledge accumulated by Morais Leitão. The answers reflect our language, our experience and our DNA. We have built a technological platform that thinks alongside us.”
Carlos Coelho
Director of Innovation and Knowledge, Morais Leitão
Benefits: turning legal knowledge into a competitive advantage
Faster access to critical knowledge
ML One AI enables users to search and explore information accumulated over several decades in a simpler and more natural way. Instead of relying solely on traditional document searches, users can ask questions and receive contextualized answers or recommendations based on their selected sources.
Maximizing internal intellectual capital
The solution makes it possible to capitalize on knowledge that already existed within Morais Leitão, including digitized excerpts from books and publications, articles, templates and documents produced over the years. This intellectual capital, which was often difficult to locate or unavailable online, is now genuinely accessible to the firm’s teams.
Greater control over sensitive data
By developing a solution tailored to Morais Leitão’s specific context, Xpand IT was able to create an approach more closely aligned with the confidentiality, security and data governance requirements of a law firm.
Technological autonomy and strategic independence
ML One AI provides Morais Leitão with a solution tailored to its specific needs, ensuring technological autonomy from generic AI solutions with high per-user licensing costs.
An experience tailored to legal work
The solution recognizes the differences between types of knowledge. Factual sources can support direct answers, while working documents, such as templates or legal submissions, are suggested as additional context. This distinction makes the experience better suited to legal practice.
Organization-wide scalability
The solution was designed to serve hundreds of users while maintaining a cost model based on the resources consumed rather than solely on individual licenses.
Supported adoption and team enablement
Morais Leitão organized training sessions in Porto and Lisbon to explain how to use the tool, share best practices and usage policies through real adoption scenarios, and prepare its teams for a new way of working with legal knowledge. In addition, all new employees receive dedicated training in Artificial Intelligence and in the use of the tool itself.
Technologies Used
Generative Artificial Intelligence
Document processing
Knowledge indexing
Conversational web portal
About Morais Leitão
Morais Leitão is an independent law firm with a strong international outlook, recognized within the Portuguese legal market for the excellence of its services and its continued investment in innovation.
The firm provides specialist legal advice across different areas of law, working with demanding and sophisticated clients in Portugal and internationally.
Through its Morais Leitão Legal Circle network, the firm strengthens its presence and ability to operate across several markets, including Portuguese-speaking countries.
Solution Type
- AI assistant for legal knowledge management;
- Intelligent search solution integrated with iManage;
- Conversational platform for accessing internal knowledge;
- Document archive indexing and processing;
- User experience for legal technology;
- Customized Generative AI solution within Microsoft Azure.
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