Shoosmiths reviewed 15 contract-AI suppliers, then built its own

Shoosmiths, a UK law firm, is piloting a contract review system called Apollo that checks draft contracts against the firm's own rulebooks, and its director of client technology says this kind of review can save three to five hours on a single document. The account is in a [Microsoft UK Stories feature dated 24 June 2026](https://ukstories.microsoft.com/features/how-shoosmiths-is-turning-legal-expertise-into-ai-powered-advantage/). Microsoft sells the cloud service Apollo runs on, so the page is vendor-published, and the hours figure is an estimate, not a pilot result.

Why the firm built instead of buying

Tony Randle, director of client technology and service improvement, says the firm reviewed around 15 suppliers and could not find a product that met its standards. It had built a contract tool before: an earlier system for commercial supply agreements "took us two years … to train" on one contract type, he says.

Apollo works from playbooks: the firm's written rules for a contract type, saying what the contract should contain, why it matters and what wording fixes a problem. Randle says a playbook can hold hundreds of rules. Built on Microsoft Azure, Apollo compares a draft with the playbook, flags each place a rule is not met, and shows the lawyer which rule it applied and why. Microsoft introduced the firm to development partners; the page does not name them or the AI models used.

The number, and what it is not

Randle's three to five hours a document is described as "drawing on earlier AI work". The page gives no measured result from the Apollo pilot. It says the pilot team handles about 3,000 documents a year. Multiplied out, that is 9,000 to 15,000 hours a year (3,000 × 3 and 3,000 × 5), but only if every document saved the full estimate; Microsoft does not make that claim and neither should a business case.

The page is silent on what Apollo cost to build and run, how long the build took, how often a flag is wrong or a breach is missed, who signs off a reviewed contract, and whether clients are billed differently for the work.

The people side

Chief executive David Jackson says the firm is "not building these tools to cut jobs"; the aim he gives is to help staff learn. No job or hiring figures are given. A trainee solicitor quoted on the page says Apollo flags issues she might have missed and explains why. Randle says 63% of partners who answered an internal poll want to be early adopters; the page does not say how many answered.

Staff also have Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio, Microsoft's tool for building agents without code. Joanne Bevan, who joined 28 years ago as a secretary and has never written code, built an agent that answers plain-English questions from a SharePoint library of procedures for a retail client with hundreds of leased properties. She calls it "just a simple retrieval agent". No time saving is reported for it.

What to do if you run legal operations

• Pick your highest-volume contract type (NDAs, supplier terms, leases) and write its playbook as numbered rules with approved fallback wording. Shoosmiths' account makes the rules, not the software, the asset, and you need them to test any product.
• In vendor demos this month, ask for the rule and the reasoning behind every flag, on your documents. A tool that cannot show them cannot be checked by the lawyer who signs.
• Before a pilot, time a manual review on 20 documents, then count wrong and missed flags as well as hours. Shoosmiths' three to five hours is an estimate from earlier work.