THE FUTURE OF
LEGAL TECHNOLOGY
TAKES CENTER STAGE.
27-30 APRIL 2025 | MYRTLE BEACH, SC
iltanet.org/evolve
5-7 APRIL, 2027 | SAVANNAH, GEORGIA
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support and to establishing
guardrails, even as many clients
restricted its use altogether.
For Troutman Pepper Locke,
this moment was not a starting
line, but a checkpoint. Work
on Athena began earlier, when
language models were far more
limited. As vendors like Casetext
demonstrated early access to
GPT4, our development team
was already deep in research
and experimentation with
early OpenAI models. That
work revealed both promise
and constraint: small context
windows, narrow use cases, and
unresolved security concerns.
Those limitations forced an early
focus on architecture, controls,
and reliability.
As Microsoft Azure began
offering GPT3 within a secure
tenant environment, the security
posture improved significantly.
Content filtering, prompt auditing, human review of high-risk inputs, and
required training were treated as prerequisites rather than afterthoughts.
With that foundation in place, Athena was made broadly available across
the firm within clear policy boundaries. The assistant went live firmwide
in August 2023, allowing real usage patterns to guide its evolution rather
than limiting access to a pilot group.
At launch, Athena was intentionally modest: a general conversational
interface without document analysis or databases. It was a starting point,
not a destination. Document interaction followed incrementally, first with
single uploads and then with multidocument analysis, each expansion
driven by concrete workflow needs rather than feature ambition.
