City law firm Shoosmiths invests extra £1m in firm’s bonus pot
City law firm Shoosmiths has doubled down on its commitment to AI after setting aside a second £1m for its bonus pot to help staff become AI-fluent through its new internal accreditation programme, CityAM can reveal.
Last year, the firm exclusively told CityAM that it set a “clear and ambitious annual target” of one million Microsoft Copilot prompts from its staff, in exchange for unlocking a £1m bonus pot. The strategy was successful, and the firm allocated the extra £1m to its bonus pool after it hit the target four months ahead of schedule, resulting in two million data points for the firm to review.
Now, Shoosmiths is moving into the next stage, which is focused on the quality and the qualitative measures its staff are using AI for.
Speaking to CityAM chief executive David Jackson explained: “We’ve created an AI fluency framework to equip our people with the skills that they will need to thrive in an AI age, and so there are four levels to the fluency framework, and we’re encouraging our people to achieve a certification on one of those four levels.”
The firm has introduced a four-tier corporate framework to certify staff on AI, which follows: AI Aware, AI Practitioner, AI Advanced, and AI Leaders. Level one is a baseline understanding of what AI is, where it helps, and the risks, such as hallucinations and confidentiality issues, while the top level is for the “frontier” cohort driving strategy, market differentiation, and client relationships using tech.
Jackson said: “I think every leader’s responsibility at the moment in any organisation is to equip their workforce with the tools that they will need to succeed for the longer term, whether that’s within Shoosmiths or whether they move on to different organisations.”
“I see it as very much my responsibility to help my people acquire the skills that they will need to be the leaders in an AI….we’re taking that really seriously, so we are putting in place the framework and the training structure to support that outcome, and we’re also putting financial incentive behind it to encourage our people to engage with the programme,” he added.
He noted that putting incentives behind these strategies “absolutely works”, after it achieved its prompt target four months earlier than planned last year.
Law firm PAs lag behind on AI
Data from its prompt strategy last year revealed structural gaps in the law firm’s AI adoption, with Personal Assistants (PAs) lagging behind.
“PA were doing things in the traditional way, and they’re not using, they’re not using these tools as much as other roles around the business,” stated Jackson.
He put this lack of use down to anxiety and fears about people’s concerns about job losses resulting from AI. He said the firm is now actively deploying its senior “ACE community” to run intervention and reassurance sessions for administrative staff as Shoosmiths is on a “growth agenda”, and is not “using tools to streamline the workforce”.
“We’re using these tools to leapfrog the competition, and that means that we could, that we’re going to grow our business, we’ll need more bodies on the ground, not fewer,” he added.
The area of the business that saw the most AI interaction was among trainees, associates, and principal associates, who drive the vast majority of AI prompts, while partners are using the tools significantly less.
However, Jackson noted that this data highlighted that its partners should use it less and should opt to remain strictly within the “old-fashioned human sense-check” and supervisory layer within their remit, and avoid errors being sent out by the firm.
“I would expect that because…when it comes to the supervision of the partners, that’s still done in the old-fashioned kind of just doing that human sense check, and I think that’s really important, and the data bears that out,” he explained.