AI for Independent Law Firms: Mauritz Kop Speaks at The Law Firm Network Annual Conference in Amsterdam

By AIRecht Editor

Amsterdam, June 13, 2019, Independent law firms face the same strategic question as their clients: what does artificial intelligence change about the work itself? Mauritz Kop addressed that question for The Law Firm Network (LFN), the non-exclusive international association of independent law firms, at its 2021 Annual Conference in Amsterdam — the network's first in-person annual conference after its 2020 virtual assembly, hosted by Amsterdam firm Wieringa. The themes connect directly to the analysis in EU Artificial Intelligence Act: The European Approach to AI.

LFN brings together member firms across jurisdictions for referrals, knowledge exchange and an annual professional program. Founded in 1989, the network gives mid-sized independent firms what global firms carry in-house: cross-border reach, peer benchmarking and a shared professional agenda. The 2021 Amsterdam edition combined that professional program with the business-development sessions documented on the LFN conferences page — and after a year of virtual assembly, the return to a physical conference room mattered for exactly the trust-building work a referral network exists to do.

Artificial intelligence for independent law firms — the conference theme in Amsterdam.

AI as a practice-management question

For law firms, AI is no longer only a subject of advice but a production technology: document review, drafting support, knowledge retrieval and risk triage. The legal questions follow immediately — professional secrecy and client confidentiality when tools process case data, quality control and supervision duties, and the liability allocation when machine output enters legal work product.

Each of those questions has a concrete shape inside a firm. Confidentiality: which client data may leave the building at all, and on what contractual and technical terms, when a review tool runs in someone else's cloud? The data-protection layer underneath that question — when processing for machine-learning purposes is lawful in the first place — is analyzed in The Right to Process Data for Machine Learning Purposes in the EU. Supervision: the professional rules that require a lawyer to stand behind the work do not bend because a system drafted the first version — so who reviews what, and how is that review evidenced? Liability: when machine-assisted analysis misses the decisive clause, the allocation of responsibility among vendor, firm and insurer is a contract question that is far cheaper to answer before procurement than after a claim. None of this argues against the technology; it argues for adopting it the way lawyers adopt everything else — deliberately, on paper, with the risk allocated.

The regulatory wave reaching clients

For their clients, the same period saw the European Commission table the first horizontal AI regulation — the April 2021 proposal that has since become the adopted EU Artificial Intelligence Act. Firms advising mid-market and enterprise clients across borders need a shared vocabulary for risk classes, conformity obligations and governance — knowledge a network of independent firms is well placed to spread. A risk-based, phased regulation rewards exactly the kind of early gap analysis independent firms can offer regional clients who lack global compliance departments.

AIRecht's teaching on these themes also reached academic audiences, as described in Mauritz Kop Lecturer AI Regulation and Intellectual Property Law at CEIPI, University of Strasbourg — and had urged structured, ex-ante assessment of AI deployments well before the regulation took shape, in the Artificial Intelligence Impact Assessment.

A readiness sequence firms can actually run

The practical takeaway for a mid-sized independent firm fits in four steps. Inventory: which AI-assisted tools are already in use, formally procured or quietly adopted? Contracts: do the engagement letters, vendor agreements and professional-indemnity terms say anything about machine-assisted work — and should they? Supervision: which categories of output require partner review, and where is that recorded? Client posture: what does the firm tell clients about its tooling, proactively or when asked? None of these steps requires a technologist; all four require a decision — which is why they belong on a managing partner's desk and not in an innovation memo.

Professional guidance has since caught up

The institutions of the profession moved in the same direction shortly afterwards. In 2022, the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe published its Guide on the use of artificial intelligence by lawyers and law firms — walking practitioners through exactly the terrain of the Amsterdam session: understanding what an AI tool does before relying on it, guarding professional secrecy when client data enters third-party systems, and keeping the lawyer's own professional judgment at the center of machine-assisted work. National bars have since layered their own guidance on top.

For firms in the room in 2021, that sequence is the point worth noticing: the questions a managing partner had to improvise answers to then are now the subject of formal professional guidance, vendor-contract templates and insurer questionnaires. Early engagement with the framework did not become obsolete — it became the head start.

What an assembly of managing partners changes

The audience composition is the leverage. A session on artificial intelligence delivered to an international assembly of managing partners reaches the people who set technology policy, sign vendor contracts and answer to clients in their own jurisdictions. Questions from the floor at such a session are rarely doctrinal; they are operational — what to pilot first, what to tell the professional-indemnity insurer, how to brief partners who did not grow up with the technology. Those are precisely the questions a legal framework lecture must be able to answer if it is to be more than scenery.

Why networks matter for AI readiness

Knowledge travels faster through a network than through any single firm. Each member firm carries the frameworks home to its own jurisdiction, bar context and client base — multiplying one session into dozens of localized conversations about confidentiality, supervision and AI governance. That is exactly the kind of leverage that makes professional-association teaching a structural part of AIRecht's practice: the law of AI is converging across Europe, but its adoption happens one firm, one engagement letter and one procurement decision at a time.

Referral logic is at work here too. A network of independent firms lives on cross-border referrals, and a referral is a trust transaction: the sending firm vouches for the receiving firm's quality. As machine-assisted work becomes normal, that vouching quietly extends to technology posture — a firm referring a data-sensitive matter abroad will want to know how the receiving firm supervises AI-assisted drafting and where its tools process client data. A network that develops a broadly shared vocabulary for those questions protects the asset it actually trades on: confidence between its members. One legal-framework session does not create that vocabulary by itself, but it is how the conversation starts — with every managing partner in the same room, hearing the same map of obligations at the same time.

Last updated: June 9, 2026