Licence to innovate: How PwC is working with law firm Hugh James to empower employees with GenAI

“Anyone who thinks GenAI is a technical solution is missing half the trick here. It's about the people,” says Rupert Poole, Chief Technology Officer at top 100 UK law firm, Hugh James.

The firm is rolling out ChatGPT Enterprise to its workforce at pace, through our alliance with OpenAI. Staff piloting the technology were encouraged to explore its potential from the outset and within 11 weeks, 91% said they felt more productive.

But it’s clear this is more than a technology upgrade. “They want to disrupt the way they're doing their work,” says Sud Parwana, Partner and UK OpenAI Alliance Leader at PwC UK. “The firm's ethos and position in the market gives them the agility they need to roll this out and get that first mover advantage.”

Hugh James’ Senior Partner Matthew Tossell is “passionately convinced” that firms failing to adopt Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) will not survive. PwC research echoes this sentiment: 61% of UK CEOs are investing in AI, cloud, and analytics, and demand for AI skills continues to rise.

By offloading repetitive, administrative tasks to ChatGPT, teams can prioritise decision-making and client collaboration. “The AI can do the heavy lifting for us, allowing the lawyers to do the stuff that humans are really good at,” explains Poole.

Innovation from within

“We're becoming human-centric again in terms of our work,” he says. This human-led approach has revealed the most valuable use cases. “Innovation comes from within the workforce, as they have the domain expertise,” says Felicity Copeland, Trust in AI Director at PwC UK. “It’s a journey we’ve been through ourselves at PwC and we found that allowing employees the space to innovate is critical.”

During the pilot, legal teams found they were able to cut time spent reviewing case materials and increase the speed of content creation. Some 150 staff, around 20% of Hugh James’ workforce, took part in the pilot and also found it useful in helping them develop complex litigation strategy and transforming how they look at significant volumes of material.

After 11 weeks, 78% of users reported saving up to an hour each week, and 93% said they were ‘very likely’ to continue using it. Gwen Morgan-Evans, Partner at Hugh James, says: “I absolutely love it. And I can’t really imagine conducting my work without AI by my side — it means we can spend more time understanding and advising clients, while technology handles the routine.”

ChatGPT Enterprise’s flexibility has also allowed the firm to build custom GPTs, such as knowledge chatbots which can access firmwide documents and policies in seconds. Custom GPTs can also help staff understand the implications of regulation, such as GDPR. “Imagine you're new to the firm,” says Poole, “you've got a buddy, and you've also got a chat bot, which you could ask any question”. He adds: “We never assume what the best use cases are.” Instead, employees are encouraged to find innovative ways to use the technology themselves and share learnings.

Moving at speed

Across the UK, CEOs say the biggest barrier to technology adoption is having the right skills, followed by a lack of understanding of return on investment. To address this, PwC and Hugh James co-developed a workforce onboarding programme that balanced technical training with broader GenAI education.

“We decided very deliberately that this technology is so different that we had to educate people first,” says Poole. The programme included university-style lectures, weekly workshops and bootcamps, where employees became well-versed in AI and its uses, before being encouraged to use GenAI at work and in their personal lives to hone their skills. “The more somebody uses it, the better the outcomes they get,” says Poole.

By taking learnings from PwC’s own GenAI journey, Hugh James has been able to build on 65 years of trusted legal service and accelerate into a new era of innovation with the technology, says Copeland. Sharing strategies of what worked and what didn’t, became valuable insight for Hugh James, helping the team to “scale adoption at speed”.

Securing the future

A key part of the rollout was helping the firm create an Acceptable Usage Policy. This gives users clear, compliant guidelines for using ChatGPT responsibly. “The legal services profession requires rigour. It requires care and trust and intelligence,” says Morgan-Evans. In a highly regulated industry, security and safety is paramount - both for clients and the firm. She sees GenAI as an accelerator, not a “substitute for judgement”.

This focus on security was addressed early on. Access to ChatGPT Enterprise has the security needed built in: “It was a gateway to ensure that we had the security, we had the safeguards that we needed,” says Poole. “We could ensure that private data wasn't being used to train the model. Our clients could have confidence in what we were doing and the technologies we were using.”

Looking ahead, Poole expects Agentic AI – which is capable of autonomously planning and executing processes – to be introduced within a year. The firm sees multiple agents handling repeatable, structured tasks. Onboarding clients is being eyed as one area of development, with AI agents managing a multi-step process. The goal is to “automate what is currently a manually intensive process, while maintaining full auditability and alignment with regulatory requirements,” Poole says.

But he’s clear on the firm’s keystone principle with the technology: “When there’s a legal task, there will always be a human in the loop".