Canadian Law Firm McMillan Puts AI Platform Legora at Centre of a Firmwide Service Upgrade

A fast push to modernize client work at McMillan

McMillan LLP announced a firmwide partnership with Legora, an AI-focused legal technology platform, aiming to reshape how the Canadian firm delivers client work. The firm said the move will touch day-to-day tasks across practices, with Legora used to organize documents, search firm knowledge, and speed drafting and review. The rollout is billed as a flagship Canadian deal for Legora and a major step in McMillan’s multi-year modernization plan.

The announcement came via a firm press release that described the pact as an effort to make lawyer teams more efficient and to give clients faster, more consistent work. McMillan framed the change as part of an overall bet on modern tools rather than a narrow cost-cutting play: technology, the firm said, will let lawyers focus more on judgment and client strategy while software handles routine work.

What this will feel like for McMillan’s clients

For clients, the most visible changes will be quicker answers and smoother teamwork. Day-to-day tasks like pulling relevant clauses from past deals, preparing first drafts of contracts, or assembling board materials should be faster when a searchable firm library is in one place.

That speed can lower the calendar time for routine deliverables and may cut billable hours spent on repetitive work. But the firm is pitching the shift mainly as a quality play: consistency and clearer reuse of past project work could reduce errors and make cross-office teams align more easily.

Certain practice areas are likely to see the biggest impact first. Transactional work — mergers and acquisitions, commercial contracts, and securities work — often relies on templates and past deals and stands to gain most. Litigation and regulatory teams can also get value from searchable case files and automated review, but those areas may need more careful human oversight because the stakes and bespoke issues are often higher.

How Legora works in plain language

Legora is a software platform that combines a few familiar ideas: a centralized place to store documents, smart search, and AI-powered drafting help. Think of it as a firm-wide library with a helpful assistant. Lawyers can search past deals and memos, pull up standard clauses, and ask the system to draft a first pass at a contract or memo.

The platform claims to connect with a firm’s existing tools so it doesn’t force a full IT overhaul. It uses machine learning to tag documents and suggest relevant content, and it offers natural-language prompts that let lawyers ask for a draft or a summary in everyday words. In practice, that means a junior lawyer could get a solid starting draft in minutes instead of spending hours building one from scratch.

Legora’s sweet spot is repeatable work: standard clauses, recurring filings, routine due diligence. For highly novel legal problems, the software provides a head start but still relies on lawyers for final judgment and tailoring.

How McMillan will roll this out — and what leaders are saying

McMillan described a phased launch. The firm will begin with pilot teams in chosen practices, expand to more groups after training and feedback, and aim for broad availability across Canadian offices over months. The plan includes in-house training sessions for lawyers and staff, a help desk, and a governance committee to tackle standards for use.

In the announcement, McMillan leadership framed the move as practical modernization. The firm said the partnership is designed to centralize knowledge and reduce repetitive tasks so lawyers spend more time on advice and client relationships. Legora’s team, quoted in the release, emphasized the platform’s flexibility and its ability to integrate with existing firm systems.

Both parties stressed a hands-on rollout rather than a big-bang switch: pilots, user feedback, and staged adoption figure prominently in the plan.

How this move fits into the wider Canadian legal-tech scene

McMillan’s decision follows a steady trend of mid- to large Canadian law firms adopting suite-style AI and knowledge platforms. Other firms have piloted document automation, e-discovery tools, and client portals, and a handful of market leaders have announced similar partnerships in recent years.

The difference here is the scale and the firm’s public framing. By calling it a flagship partnership and pushing a firmwide rollout, McMillan signals a more aggressive embrace than cautious, isolated pilots. That will likely push peer firms to evaluate broader deployments rather than small experiments.

Competition in the space is brisk: several vendors offer document search and drafting features, while bigger incumbents in the document-management world are racing to add AI. For clients, the result should be faster service across the market, but it will also raise questions about standards and interoperability as different firms adopt different toolsets.

Privacy, ethics and the governance questions to watch

Aside from convenience, the change raises real privacy and confidentiality questions. Law firms hold sensitive client data, and integrating it with an AI platform requires clear rules about data storage, access controls, and whether training data is retained by the vendor.

McMillan’s announcement says governance and security will be front and centre, and that the firm will set access rules and oversight. Still, clients should expect to see written policies on how their files are handled and options to limit what data is used for model training. Ethical issues about unsupervised drafting and lawyer responsibility will also need clear internal rules.

Overall, the move is a practical step toward modern legal work. It promises faster, more consistent service, but it also demands careful rules and active oversight to keep client information safe and lawyer judgment central.

Sources

• prnewswire.com