The law firm Kirkland & Ellis has launched an artificial intelligence platform built with Palantir, and the firm’s chief legal officer believes it could transform what young associates do on the job.
The Fund Formation Engine is a platform that handles repeated tasks within private fund work, including the drafting of limited partnership agreements, closing investor commitments, and tracking compliance. Erica Berthou, a partner at Kirkland and a member of the firm’s executive committee, told PitchBook that the tool embeds the firm’s own legal knowledge rather than depending on generic training data.
This section explains the operation of the platform, its significance for legal practice, and Berthou’s view that it will help associates climb the career ladder more quickly.
The Fund Formation Engine
The Fund Formation Engine was rolled out by Kirkland in June, a product of collaboration with Palantir. Its basic concept is straightforward — rather than training an AI on publicly available information, the firm is training it on its own internal documents.
The engine taps into Kirkland’s model document collection, answers investor inquiries, and follows every obligation clients take on with their investors. Berthou characterized it as a custom fund creation engine that incorporates all of the firm’s legal expertise within the funds field.
This approach stands apart from off-the-shelf tools, which draw their training on common knowledge and publicly available data, while this system is built from Kirkland’s own precedents and decisions.
What Clients Are Actually Doing
A great deal of Berthou’s work involves speaking with in-house legal teams at her clients about ways they can run their operations more efficiently through the use of AI. When it comes to private equity firms, these tools typically get put to work for fast document review and pulling out key terms.
The way she put it was that general practitioners now send legal queries through artificial intelligence before contacting their lawyers, which leaves them with more focused questions when they finally reach counsel. She referred to this arrangement as “a really great development for our industry.”.
Limited Partners and the Pace of Change
According to Berthou, limited partners, fund managers, and law firms share the same view about using AI for efficiency. He noted that speed counts in fundraising, and quicker analysis gives human judgment a stronger foundation.
The rate of change raises doubts. Every person faces a difficult learning process concerning AI, she explained. Consider where everyone stood five years ago, where you were two years ago, and where you are right now.
Getting an organization to take on a new technology is its own challenge, and it comes with a whole set of procedures to consider. Those include:
- The technological and legal safeguards that govern how the tools get put to use.
- The training and supervision required to keep staff competent.
- The documentation needed to track what the tools actually produce.
Costs in Fund Agreements
There has been no actual use of AI cost provisions in fund agreements so far, according to Berthou. She argued that there exists a proper fee that can be carried by a fund, and she compared AI to established document management systems such as Microsoft Word.
“I don’t think AI creates entirely novel issues from a cost perspective,” she said.
The evidence points to the existing economic model for legal work holding together. When artificial intelligence is regarded as a tool instead of a service, the way costs get assigned could end up following well-known patterns.
Junior Associates and the Job of the Future
Some of the simpler legal-administrative and data-extraction tasks — reviewing NDA upon NDA upon NDA — will be muted, Berthou predicted. Nobody becomes a better NDA expert by doing 10,000 of them, compared with 100.
She believes that younger lawyers will rise to senior positions faster, with less time spent on routine tasks and more devoted to offering sound, considered legal counsel.
“We will spend more time on human interaction and less time just pinging emails back and forth,” she said.
What New Lawyers Need to Know
Berthou looks for open minds and open hearts when hiring associates. She does not require a law student arriving at the group today to already be skilled in every kind of AI or to hold an engineering background.
“But we do train all our lawyers when they join us, and we expect that, over time, they really get to AI adoption,” she said.
Her point was that a person assisted by AI would outpace a person who relies on no AI at all, advancing further and faster.
The Email Drafting Question
When Berthou was asked point-blank if AI would ever write her emails, she answered with a touch of humor, but made her position clear.
“Do you notice when somebody sends you an email drafted by AI or not?” she asked.
The personal touch counts for human connection, she said, even as AI helps prepare drafts of more complex emails.
“You should be wary if you get an email from me with no Swedish English in it,” she said.
Billing and Value Pricing
Berthou noted that there is room for a shift toward project-based value billing instead of strict hourly billing. When both sides know what they’re getting into and already have experience working together, they can settle on a fair price for the job ahead of time.
“If you don’t have the personal touch — a cute emoji or whatever your trademark is — how do you connect with people? Human connection is a really important differentiator,” she said.
The Broader Picture
The change at Kirkland is part of a wider shift. Advisers tied to private equity are rushing to use AI and automation for the work they do with fund managers and their investors. Among law firms, Kirkland & Ellis has been one of the most active users of these tools.
Over three to four years, the company set aside $500 million for the development of its own AI tool.
The interview was edited for clarity and brevity.
What We Make of It
The claim Berthou makes is that AI isn’t taking over lawyers’ jobs; it’s simply making their work faster. The dull, repetitive administrative tasks vanish, leaving the human judgment that clients actually pay for with more room to do its job.
The basic principles stay the same even if how legal work gets paid for changes. What the customer buys is guidance, not computing capacity. Should artificial intelligence supply that guidance quicker and with greater precision, the charge based on time spent could disappear, yet the value of the result would endure.
Berthou thinks the young lawyers who master these tools will rise through their ranks more quickly.
That is a strong bet for a senior partner to make.
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