Source: CIO
The legal firm’s Smart Resourcing tool helps balance workloads and ensure partners find associates with the right skills and experience, while empowering employees to make connections across the firm’s global footprint.
AI is increasingly being embraced for workplace enhancements across every industry — and that includes the legal world. Pittsburgh-based global law firm Reed Smith has enlisted AI to facilitate resource management, improve employee engagement, and reduce imbalanced workloads among lawyers across the firm. The resulting Smart Resourcing earned Reed Smith a 2023 CIO 100 Award for innovation and IT leadership.
While well established in industries such as accounting, resource management is still relatively new for legal firms, says Aaron Pendlebury, director of the Smart Resourcing team at Reed Smith. The tool, which was envisioned to boost the relationship between partners and lawyers, was developed with a focus on making use of everyone’s skillset and improving productivity and efficiency across the firm. Smart Resourcing helps ensure associates are assigned with work that interests them and plays to their skills, helping to reduce turnover while improving engagement and retention of the firm’s lawyers.
Jon Oeler, director of digital transformation and head of the solutions development team, says the Smart Resourcing platform is a natural progression from the firm’s previous use of resource management, which included a mostly self-service model, along with an early stage full-service offering localized to a few specific offices. In developing Smart Resourcing, Oeler’s team and Pendlebury’s team joined forces to figure out how best to balance the two methods to create a stronger platform for allocating resources.
“We saw value in each [method] and really wanted to incorporate that into a total tool,” Oeler says. “So that’s where a lot of the analysis went, and that’s where the idea behind Smart Resourcing was born.”
While the platform’s use of AI has provided worthwhile dividends, Oeler says the firm doesn’t look at AI as a “pancea,” but rather as a tool to help solve business problems, and his team will continue to thoughtfully implement AI tools where it makes sense and can help humans be more efficient and productive.
Read full article: https://www.cio.com/article/1251982/reed-smith-turns-to-ai-for-lawyer-staffing-solution.html
