Copilot and AI in the Legal Sector and Work Transformation - Matt Peers, Global COO, Pinsent Mason

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Who should listen: M365 service owners and IT leaders in legal and professional services planning or scaling a Copilot rollout, plus anyone responsible for adoption, licensing strategy and change management around Teams and generative AI.

Guest: Matt Peers — Global COO, Pinsent Masons

Matt Peers is Global COO at Pinsent Masons, a 3,500-person law firm across 28 offices, having previously held CIO and COO roles at a Big Four firm and a Magic Circle law firm. He talks to Tom Arbuthnot about running Copilot as an early adopter, the licence throttling and champion model behind adoption, and why Teams has displaced Outlook as the working-day anchor for lawyers.

Many thanks to Pure IP, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

• Pinsent Masons deliberately has not licensed the whole firm for Copilot. There is a throttling point and a significant internal queue; a licence is only released to the next person once existing holders are demonstrably making good use of it. It is as much an adoption tactic as a cost control, because it forces the firm to keep tracking where value is actually being created. ▶ 13:20
• Rather than measuring claimed time saved, the early adopter evaluation asked users "if we took Copilot away now, what would you miss?" The honest answers were meeting summaries, catching up after joining a call late, and first-draft meeting notes — not "I got 28 extra minutes a day". ▶ 9:44
• Adoption was structured as "communities of practice", each focused on one aspect of Copilot — meeting summaries, document collaboration and so on — rather than a single generic rollout group. ▶ 12:19
• Peers' three-point adoption advice: training has to be continuous, not a launch event; real people telling short, sharp success stories is the most powerful engagement lever; and champions must be people who can frame it as a different way of working rather than a new tech feature. ▶ 22:36
• The anchor point of a lawyer's day has moved from Outlook to Teams — chats and channels are now the first thing opened. Peers calls this a radical cultural change after decades of Outlook-centred working habits, helped by the full calendar now living in Teams. ▶ 14:51
• The etiquette gap is real: an email gets a same-day response expectation, a Teams message gets an almost-immediate one. Firms need to help people over the hump that channel conversations are not instant messaging, or people spend the day triaging messages instead of doing the work — and then feel their working days are too long. ▶ 16:24
• Most larger law firms run a formal document and records management system that sits outside Microsoft search and is not fully integrated into the ecosystem. With millions of documents and emails in the DMS, Pinsent Masons is working with vendors on how those journeys sit side by side, because pitching credentials and reusing prior work needs that data safely exposed to LLMs. ▶ 18:27
• Be patient with the gaps: Copilot prompts to help in Excel and then cannot do the task, leaving users deciding how long to persist versus doing it another way. Unlike the Lync-to-Skype-for-Business era of numbered releases, functionality now arrives continuously, which is genuinely hard to communicate to busy end users. ▶ 23:37
• Viva Engage has become the firm's highest-engagement channel on AI — the director of knowledge runs short, sharp AI refreshers off his own initiative and has attracted more subscribers and active engagement than any other topic Peers has seen at the firm. ▶ 24:39

Insights summarised by AI from the episode transcript, reviewed by the Empowering.Cloud team.

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