Will Gaus, Chief Knowledge Management and Innovation Officer at Troutman Pepper Locke, was quoted in the July 23, 2025 Fortune article, “AI Isn’t Just Entering Law Offices—It’s Challenging the Entire Legal Playbook.”

According to Troutman Pepper Locke chief innovation officer William Gaus, the firm’s staff prompt Athena about 3,000 times every day. 

For Troutman Pepper Locke, the firm also found use of its AI tools outside of daily functions, such as using it heavily in the firm’s recent merger. Gaus and the merger team itself used Athena as a thought partner, keeping running dialogues for different work streams of the merger such as finance, technology, and marketing.

They also created an agentic capability to redraft the bios of the incoming 1,600 attorneys, which needed to be updated to account for the new firm’s information and adhere to its existing style. Gaus said this made the process seamless compared to the six months it took to manually update attorney bios with the last merger, saving $200,000 in time spent. Overall, Gaus said they’re currently finding AI to be most useful for backend admin tasks, which he believes are a great place to start because they’re low risk.

“We wanted to make sure to get these people answers as quickly as possible. So if we could build a system, like a generative AI system in this case, that could reliably get them answers to their questions around billing and collections, for example, we would obviously go for something like that over the old school methods,” said Gaus.

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