ILTA Awards

2026 / T R A N S F O R M A T I V E P R O J E C T O F T H E Y E A R T h e p ro j e ct a l s o e m p h a s i ze d gove r n a n c e , et h i c s , a n d professional development. Ballard Spahr implemented rigorous controls around client confidentiality, human oversight, and AI governance to ensure that AI augmented -- not replaced -- professional judgment. The firm's AI Competency Educational Series (ACES) provided attorneys and business professionals with practical training on secure, ethical, and effective AI use, helping expand internal expertise while reducing organizational risk associated with generative AI adoption. T h ro u g h c l o s e co l l a b o rat i o n b et we e n l i t i gat i o n te a m s , innovation professionals, technologists, and information security leadership, Ballard Spahr established a scalable, repeatable, and peer-transferable model for responsibly deploying agentic AI in complex litigation. The initiative demonstrates how disciplined governance, attorney-defined workflows, and advanced AI capabilities can work together to dramatically improve efficiency, reduce costs, accelerate strategic insight, and redefine how high-volume litigation work is performed. SYLLO WORKBENCH The Impact The initiative demonstrates how peer-driven, responsibly governed AI can be operationalized in active litigation to produce defensible work product at scale, resulting in meaningful gains in efficiency, quality, and attorney experience, as well as dramatic reductions in client costs, for complex, high-stakes matters. used Syllo's AI Workbench to review an initial production of approximately 860,000 documents in roughly ten days, reducing review timelines from months to days while cutting costs by more than 50%. Subsequent rolling productions were processed within one to two days of receipt, allowing litigation teams to maintain momentum in a fast-moving multidistrict litigation while surfacing critical materials earlier in the litigation lifecycle. The AI-enabled workflow leveraged more than 1,200 key factual propositions to ensure consistent identification and tagging of relevant materials tied to core legal and factual issues. This consistency accelerated downstream litigation activities, including motion practice, expert preparation, chronology development, and deposition strategy, while reducing manual review effort and improving the quality and repeatability of litigation analysis. Beyond responsive review and issue tagging, Ballard Spahr expanded the operating model across multiple litigation workflows, including contention interrogatories, identification of production deficiencies, subpoena responses, chronology generation, and deposition preparation. In matters involving more than 25 depositions, the platform generated transcript summaries, document digests, and issue-based analyses that improved consistency across litigation teams and accelerated preparation timelines. ILTA AWARDS OF EXCELLENCE 2026 6 5

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