ILTA Awards
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/1545624
Ballard Spahr LLP I n 2025, Ballard Spahr operationalized agentic artificial intelligence across active litigation workflows, transforming large-scale document review from a labor-intensive, sequential process into a governed, attorney-directed o p e r a t i n g m o d e l c a p a b l e o f p r o d u c i n g defensible work product at unprecedented scale. Building on its 2024 implementation of Syllo, a generative AI-powered litigation platform, the firm deployed Syllo's AI Workbench, an agentic AI system that coordinates multiple large language models under attorney-defined parameters. This initiative enabled Ballard Spahr to streamline responsive review, issue tagging, factual development, and deposition preparation across complex, high-stakes litigation matters while materially reducing client costs and improving consistency. Rather than treating AI as an experimental or isolated tool, Ballard Spahr embedded it directly into live litigation workflows under structured governance and legal oversight. Attorneys established detailed i s s u e f r a m ewo r ks , re l eva n ce st a n d a rd s , q u a l i t y t h r e s h o l d s , a n d ove r s i g h t c h e c k p o i n t s b e f o r e deployment, ensuring that AI execution reflected legal strategy and professional judgment rather than automated substitution. This approach allowed the firm to responsibly operationalize AI while preserving defensibility, transparency, and client trust in active matters. The project's most significant impact emerged in a complex antitrust multidistrict litigation involving approximately 1.6 million documents across multiparty productions. Under traditional contract-attorney review models averaging 40 to 45 documents per hour, review at this scale would have required thousands of attorney hours and several hundred thousand dollars in incremental costs. By contrast, once review parameters and issue frameworks were finalized, Ballard Spahr PROJECT Agentic AI Litigation Workbench Transforming high-stakes litigation through attorney-governed AI workflows that accelerated document review, reduced costs, and improved consistency across complex matters 2026 WINNER ILTA AWARDS OF EXCELLENCE 2026 6 4