ML One AI: Generative AI Driving Legal Innovation
How Morais Leitão Is transforming access to legal knowledge
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 and intelligent search
- Generative Artificial Intelligence
- iManage integration, document processing and indexing
- Conversational experience and 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
The documents varied in nature and required different approaches: some supported factual responses, while others called for suggestions and contextualization.
Sensitive data and internal control
Sensitive information had to remain within a controlled environment, avoiding exposure to external tools without proper 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 simplifies access to decades of knowledge, enabling users to search for information and obtain contextualized answers or suggestions.
Maximizing internal intellectual capital
Knowledge that was previously scattered or difficult to find is now more accessible to teams.
Greater control over sensitive data
A solution tailored to Morais Leitão provides greater control over data confidentiality, security, and governance.
Technological autonomy and strategic independence
ML One AI addresses Morais Leitão’s specific needs, strengthening its autonomy from AI solutions with high per-user costs.
An experience tailored to legal work
The solution distinguishes between different types of knowledge, adapting responses and suggestions to the nature of each source.
Organization-wide scalability
The solution was designed for hundreds of users, with costs based on resource usage rather than solely on individual licenses.
Supported adoption and team enablement
Morais Leitão conducted training sessions, shared best practices, and equipped teams to use both the tool and Artificial Intelligence effectively.
Technologies Used
About Morais Leitão
Morais Leitão is an independent law firm with a strong international focus, recognized in the Portuguese legal market for its excellence and commitment to innovation. It provides specialized legal advice across multiple areas of law to demanding and sophisticated clients in Portugal and internationally.
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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