How DLA Piper Is Using AI for Legal Intake at a Global Firm

TL;DR#

DLA Piper — the global law firm with 90+ offices, more than 4,800 lawyers, and presence across roughly 36 jurisdictions — has become one of the most public biglaw AI adopters in 2026, with three named initiatives: a 2024 partnership with Iris (then "Iris.ai") for legal research, a firmwide Microsoft 365 Copilot deployment, and Aiden, a custom-trained internal model built in collaboration with Litera. Biglaw "intake" is not the call-center funnel personal-injury firms use; it is a sequence of formal RFPs, conflict checks, OCG (outside counsel guidelines) negotiation, and matter intake — buyers are general counsel at Fortune 500s, not consumers Googling for a lawyer. DLA Piper's AI investments mostly target the work that happens after intake (research, drafting, document review), not the qualification layer where AI client intake software is reshaping smaller firms. For the AmLaw 100, that's rational; for the 50-to-500-attorney mid-market firms competing with them on regional bet-the-company matters, the white space is the conversational-intake layer that biglaw built in-house and personal-injury firms outsourced to call centers. This post explains what DLA Piper is actually doing, what mid-sized firms can borrow, and why ai legal intake is the wedge for everyone outside the AmLaw 50.

Who DLA Piper Is in 2026#

DLA Piper is the world's largest law firm by lawyer headcount, with more than 4,800 lawyers across 90+ offices in roughly 36 jurisdictions, and gross revenue that has consistently placed it among the top three firms globally on the American Lawyer's Global 100 ranking. Formed from the 2005 merger of UK-based DLA, US-based Piper Rudnick, and Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich, the firm operates as a Swiss verein — a legal structure that lets the international and US arms share branding and strategy without commingling profits.

A few stats that frame why AI matters for a firm this size:

• 4,800+ lawyers across the verein, per the firm's own 2026 fact sheet and recent American Lawyer profiles
• 90+ offices in 36 jurisdictions — every G20 economy is covered
• Top-3 global revenue alongside Kirkland & Ellis and Latham & Watkins on the 2025 Global 100
• ~$3.5B in 2024 gross revenue for the verein, with US-only revenue around $2.4B
• Average partner profits per equity partner (PEP) in the high six figures to low seven figures, depending on whether you look at the US or international arm

For a firm of this scale, the cost of any inefficiency in how matters are opened, conflicts cleared, and work scoped runs into eight or nine figures annually. That's the financial logic behind every AI initiative DLA Piper has announced.

What Biglaw "Intake" Actually Means#

In biglaw, intake is not what most legal-tech vendors picture when they hear the word. It is a multi-stage corporate procurement workflow that runs roughly like this:

This is fundamentally different from what happens when someone Googles "car accident lawyer near me" and lands on a personal-injury firm's contact form. For the PI-firm playbook, see our companion post on how Morgan & Morgan rebuilt client intake at the country's largest personal-injury firm — a totally different intake reality with totally different AI implications.

Biglaw intake is corporate procurement, not lead capture. The "leads" are pre-qualified by virtue of being the GC of a Fortune 500 already calling the firm. The bottleneck is conflicts, pricing, and engagement letters — not whether the prospect is real.

That distinction explains why DLA Piper's AI investments cluster downstream of intake (research, drafting, review) rather than at the front door. The front door isn't broken at biglaw.

DLA Piper's Public AI Initiatives#

DLA Piper has been unusually open about its generative AI work compared with peers, partly because the firm runs an "AI & Data Analytics" practice externally and is selling AI advisory to clients. Three initiatives are on the public record.

Iris partnership (legal research, 2024)#

In 2024 DLA Piper announced a partnership with Iris (the legal-research AI sometimes referred to in earlier coverage as Iris.ai) to roll out AI-powered legal research tools across the firm's transactional and litigation practices. Coverage in LegalTech News and Above the Law framed the deal as a top-three-by-revenue firm's bet that natural-language legal research would replace large blocks of associate hours previously spent on Westlaw and LexisNexis searches. The firm has not disclosed associate-hours saved, but partners quoted in The American Lawyer described "step-change" reductions in routine research turnaround.

Microsoft 365 Copilot firmwide rollout#

DLA Piper was among the first AmLaw 25 firms to commit to a firmwide Microsoft 365 Copilot deployment, integrating generative AI into Outlook, Word, Teams, and SharePoint for all attorneys and staff. The American Lawyer's 2025 AmLaw Tech survey listed DLA Piper as one of seven Global 100 firms with documented firmwide Copilot deployments at scale. Internal use cases include first-draft document generation, meeting summarization, and email triage — workflow plumbing rather than legal substance, but at 4,800 lawyers the productivity math is material.

Aiden — custom-trained internal model#

The most distinctive of the three is Aiden, a custom-trained model that DLA Piper announced in collaboration with Litera. Aiden is trained on the firm's own knowledge base — historical matters, internal precedent banks, anonymized prior work product — and is designed to surface "the way DLA Piper would draft this" rather than generic LLM output. Litera, a legal-tech vendor focused on drafting, was named as the development partner. This kind of custom training is what AmLaw 25 firms can do that smaller firms cannot — you need both the document corpus and the engineering budget.

For context on how peer firms are approaching the same problem, see our deep dive on Latham & Watkins's generative AI playbook, which uses a similar mix of vendor partnership plus custom internal tooling.

Where AI Client Intake Fits in the Biglaw vs PI Playbook#

The phrase "ai legal intake" means three completely different things depending on firm size and practice mix.

DLA Piper sits squarely in row one. Almost none of what they've publicly announced — Iris, Copilot, Aiden — is doing what AI client intake software typically does for smaller firms: qualifying prospects, capturing matter scope, routing inquiries to the right practice, doing initial conflicts triage before a human attorney is involved. Biglaw doesn't need a chatbot at the front door because its front door is a corporate procurement portal.

The white space is row three. Mid-sized firms have lateral partner-led practices that get RFP'd into deals but also get referral inbound and direct prospect calls. They have neither biglaw's engineering team nor PI firms' call-center scale economics. They are the firms most likely to benefit from a conversational AI client intake layer that does what biglaw built internally and PI firms outsourced — but configured for a 200-attorney firm's workflow.

What Mid-Sized Firms Can Borrow from DLA Piper#

Even if your firm doesn't have the budget for an Aiden-class internal model, a few things from the DLA Piper playbook generalize.

1. Treat AI use disclosure as table stakes in OCG negotiation. DLA Piper and its peers have spent 2024–2026 working through how to disclose AI assistance to Fortune 500 clients without losing the engagement. American Lawyer's 2025 GC survey found that 71% of Fortune 500 GCs now ask about AI use in OCG negotiations. A mid-sized firm pitching against biglaw will be asked the same questions; have the answer ready.

2. Separate research AI from drafting AI from intake AI. DLA Piper's three initiatives target three different work surfaces. Don't try to buy one tool that does everything — that's how legal-tech budgets get vaporized. Pick the highest-leverage surface for your firm. For most mid-sized firms, that's intake and conflicts, not research.

3. Get the matter-opening workflow right before adding AI on top. Aiden works for DLA Piper because matter opening, billing, and KM are already on a clean Intapp/Litera stack. AI on top of a messy matter-opening process compounds the mess. For how to think about replacing legacy intake forms with conversational AI, the sequencing matters.

4. Use conversational intake where your client base is mixed. If you have 30% Fortune 500 GC work and 70% middle-market companies and high-net-worth individuals, a single PDF intake form across that mix is malpractice waiting to happen. Conversational intake adapts to the inquirer — a GC gets routed differently than a founder. See our broader analysis of why law firms are replacing forms with conversations for the underlying argument.

5. Build the conflicts-triage layer before you build the marketing layer. DLA Piper's conflicts database is probably the firm's single most valuable knowledge asset. The mid-market analog is investing in conflicts automation before any client-facing AI. Automated client screening is the foundation; conversational intake sits on top of it.

Comparison: DLA Piper vs Morgan & Morgan vs Mid-Sized Firm AI Intake Stack#

To make the size differences concrete, here's how the same nominal capability — "AI client intake" — actually shows up at three different firm types:

The mid-sized-firm column is where the practical opportunity sits. Those firms cannot replicate Aiden, and they shouldn't try to replicate Morgan & Morgan's call center. They need a conversational intake layer that fits between the two. That is precisely the gap Perspective AI was built to fill — conversational intake for professional services firms that need to qualify, scope, and route inquiries without sounding like a chatbot or burning a partner's morning.

The Reality Check: What DLA Piper Hasn't Publicly Solved#

Worth being honest about: DLA Piper has not publicly disclosed any AI deployment specifically targeting client intake. Iris is research. Copilot is workflow. Aiden is internal drafting. The firm's intake process — RFP response, conflicts, OCG — still runs largely on the same Intapp / Aderant / Elite stack as five years ago, augmented by Copilot inside Word and Outlook.

That's not a criticism. For a firm of DLA Piper's size and client mix, the AI ROI is almost certainly higher on associate-leveraged work (research, document review, first drafts) than on intake. Biglaw intake isn't broken — it's just expensive in a way that's hard to compress.

The takeaway for everyone else: don't assume that because biglaw isn't deploying AI at the front door, the front door is fine for your firm. Biglaw's front door is a corporate procurement portal with a $3M average matter. Your firm's front door is probably a PDF or a contact form, and the average matter is $40K. The math on intake automation is very different at $40K matters than at $3M matters.

For a fuller view of the legal-tech intake landscape, see our comparison of the eight intake-software options that mid-sized firms actually evaluate, and our overview of AI legal intake automation in 2026.

Frequently Asked Questions#

What AI tools does DLA Piper actually use?#

DLA Piper has publicly disclosed three main AI initiatives: a 2024 partnership with Iris for legal research, a firmwide Microsoft 365 Copilot deployment across Outlook, Word, Teams, and SharePoint, and Aiden — a custom-trained internal model built in collaboration with Litera and trained on the firm's own knowledge base. The firm has not publicly disclosed AI tools specifically for client intake, conflicts, or matter opening; those workflows continue to run on Intapp and Aderant infrastructure.

Does DLA Piper use AI for client intake?#

DLA Piper does not have a publicly disclosed AI client intake product. Biglaw intake is fundamentally a corporate procurement workflow — RFP response, conflicts check, OCG negotiation, matter opening — not the inbound-lead funnel that "AI client intake" usually describes. The firm uses Microsoft Copilot inside Outlook and Word to accelerate drafting work during intake, but qualification and conflicts checks remain human-led on Intapp infrastructure.

How is biglaw intake different from personal-injury firm intake?#

Biglaw intake is a multi-week corporate procurement process involving RFPs, formal conflicts checks, outside counsel guideline negotiation, and engagement letters — buyers are typically Fortune 500 general counsel with pre-existing relationships. Personal-injury intake is a high-volume consumer lead-qualification process, often running through 24/7 call centers that screen hundreds of inbound inquiries a day. The first prioritizes conflicts and pricing; the second prioritizes speed-to-first-response. The same phrase "ai legal intake" describes completely different software needs in each context.

What is Aiden and how does it work?#

Aiden is DLA Piper's custom-trained internal AI model, developed in collaboration with Litera and announced as part of the firm's broader generative AI strategy. It is trained on the firm's own knowledge base — historical matters, anonymized prior work product, internal precedent banks — and is designed to produce drafts that match how DLA Piper attorneys would actually approach a given task, rather than generic LLM output. It is an example of the kind of custom training that AmLaw 25 firms can afford and that smaller firms typically cannot.

Can mid-sized firms use the same AI legal intake approach as biglaw?#

Mid-sized firms (50–500 attorneys) should not try to replicate biglaw's AI stack — they lack the engineering budget, document corpus, and procurement complexity that justify a custom-trained internal model. The more practical pattern is to deploy a conversational AI client intake layer that qualifies and scopes inquiries before a partner is involved, combined with automated conflicts triage and a clean matter-opening workflow. The opportunity for mid-sized firms is intake automation; biglaw's opportunity is research and drafting automation.

How does DLA Piper disclose AI use to clients?#

DLA Piper, like other Global 100 firms, formally addresses AI use in outside counsel guidelines (OCG) negotiations with corporate clients, as documented in The American Lawyer's 2025 GC survey, which found 71% of Fortune 500 GCs now ask about AI use during engagement. Specific OCG language varies by client but typically covers what AI tools the firm uses, how client data is handled inside those tools, and whether AI-generated work product is reviewed by a licensed attorney before delivery.

Conclusion#

DLA Piper is one of the clearest examples of how the largest firms are deploying AI in 2026 — Iris for research, Copilot for workflow, Aiden for drafting — and a useful counter-example for anyone assuming ai legal intake software is the right wedge for every firm. At 4,800 lawyers and $3.5B in revenue, the highest-leverage AI investment is downstream of intake, on the associate-leveraged work that consumes the most billable hours. The front door is already gated by RFP and conflicts processes that aren't broken.

For the 50-to-500-attorney mid-sized firms that don't have biglaw's engineering team or PI firms' call-center scale, the calculation flips. The front door is the bottleneck. PDF intake forms and contact forms throw away matter scope, route the wrong inquiries to the wrong partners, and treat a Fortune 1000 GC and a high-net-worth individual the same way.

If your firm is in that mid-market band, the practical move isn't to copy DLA Piper. It's to install a conversational ai legal intake layer that qualifies, scopes, and routes — and then layer research and drafting AI on top once intake is no longer the bottleneck. Perspective AI's conversational intake was built for exactly this gap. See how it works for legal practices, or start a free research project to test it against your current intake form.