US multinational law firm Wilson Sonsini at ILTACON this year took to the stage with Salesforce to detail the work the pair are doing together to prepare for the agentic AI era, with Salesforce saying that “client relationship management isn’t enough.”
One of the first public glimpses of the work being done behind the scenes, this session was led by Wilson Sonsini’s CIO Jeffrey Lolley and Salesforce’s global account director and legal industry lead Kiel Parker.
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Lolley pointed to Wilson Sonsini’s long relationship with Salesforce, which is also a client. “It started around how we weaponise data and institutionalise it,” he observed.
At Wilson Sonsini, Salesforce is used for pitches and providing context around the current business with the client, and who might have touchpoints with a new client. All RFPs are fed in and it has become an overarching pitch management platform. Lolley says: “It started with a box we knew could do great things, and letting individuals know they can rely on it every day to grow their business. We use it for consistency, speed, pitches, RFPs and a lot of effort went into that.”
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Wilson Sonsini talks about the creation of an engine and Lolley says: “It started out by us saying we need a data lake house across all our data. We are unique in Silicon Valley. We have data in NetDocuments and G-Suite and we are never going to get to a stage where it’s in one place, and we need to embrace that, it’s the culture of the firm. So we needed a data layer and had to decide how to govern it. How do we make sure we comply with our client obligations? So we needed a governance layer that is LLM agnostic that we can provide to users. That is the stack I associate with what we do with Salesforce. That was the first set of data we chose to provide, and that interface is how we set out to deliver to clients and make the way we respond to RFPs and do pitches even faster. The foundation of knowledge is there. All those years of putting data in had to be a part of our ecosystem as we thought about our AI journey.”
Wilson Sonsini is one of the leading advisors to the tech industry and Lolley described a culture at the firm where partners push hard on new ideas “but we need to balance being super innovative with how we deliver work in a safe and secure way.” He says: “At partner retreats we talk about it over a glass of wine and discuss what the balance should be, they really understand it and what is driving us forward at the same time.”
The hardest part is the data, and Lolley says: “When we started out, our data was all over the place and we had to build around it. We’ll never get to a place where our data is all in one place.”
He adds: “With Salesforce it’s how to extract data from people’s heads and so automation is key. Getting people to understand the value of and getting data that was clean was the biggest challenge. You hear about people who went out and bought the first thing and sat it on top of data that wasn’t clean. But the data needs to be the first part.”
In a fireside chat on stage, Parker asked Lolley about trust – how did users come to trust Salesforce and understand that it meant no more extra admin work? Lolley said that adoption has risen over time thanks to success stories, commenting simply: “Going into meetings, lawyers had information they wouldn’t have had, so wanted to use it again.” The licensing grew incrementally.
Perhaps most interestingly, when it comes to the clearest near-term value for agentic AI, Lolley said: “By embracing these technologies we do can great work for people quicker. It’s not how will it flip our world up but how will we make it part of our DNA and structure the firm round it in terms of our thought processes and engagement.” Wilson Sonsini didn’t want to build a new data environment and Lolley says: “We wanted to build an engine that could make decisions for our lawyers that takes decision making out of their hands. Associates want to know if they can do this or that in an AI platform and our system does that for you.”
A demo during the session looked at Salesforce’s ‘harmonisation engine’ which refers to the metadata ingestion and mapping within the Salesforce Data Cloud.
Please note, Legal IT Insider took notes during the live session at ILTACON and so quotes may slightly differ to the transcript of the session, which we will share when it becomes available.