Technology

A Big Law Firm Aims to (Partly) Automate Big Law

Wilson Sonsini’s year-old subsidiary says its AI can save clients 80% to 90% on California’s sweeping data privacy legislation.

Photographer: Illustration: Lia Kantrowitz for Bloomberg Businessweek

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By Roy Strom

December 16, 2019 at 10:00 AM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

This article is part of the December 23, 2019 issue of businessweek.

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), passed in 2018 and set to take effect on Jan. 1, will require an estimated 500,000 companies with annual revenue of more than $25 million to account for the personal information they’ve filed away about Californians and delete it upon request. All told, the law’s adoption will cost those companies about $55 billion in legal fees, employee training, and other compliance measures, according to an impact assessment prepared for the California attorney general’s office by Berkeley Economic Advising and Research, a consulting firm. That leaves plenty of room for savings, says Kimball Parker, especially if you can do the legal work with far fewer lawyers.

Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati is the only one of the top 50 U.S. law firms with an office in the small city of Lehi, Utah. There, Parker is the president of the firm’s year-old subsidiary, SixFifty, which aims to deliver the quality of Wilson Sonsini’s top legal minds via software. His team of 15 has taken an early lead in the nascent market for legal automation by focusing on the data-privacy law, an issue key to its parent’s core Silicon Valley interests.