Eversheds Sutherland: Agentic AI for Legal Business Services

Eversheds Sutherland: Improving Efficiency in Legal Business Services with Agentic AI

How Eversheds Sutherland is partnering with Telefónica Tech to transform business services through governed, scalable, and innovative agentic AI solutions

Legal | Agentic AI Consultancy Download PDF

About the Customer

A law firm committed to responsible business

Eversheds Sutherland is a global law firm providing legal services to an international client base, including many of the world’s largest organisations. Operating seamlessly across dozens of countries, Eversheds Sutherland is consistently ranked among the 50 largest legal practices in the world.

As part of a wider data modernisation programme with Telefónica Tech, Eversheds Sutherland are progressing from early AI adoption to structured, scalable AI adoption, with strong foundations in place and a clear need for governance, operating model, and delivery maturity.

The Challenge

Turning analytics into action with agentic AI

While the legal industry remains at an early stage of AI adoption overall, Eversheds Sutherland has taken a deliberate approach focusing first on building strong data foundations before scaling analytics capability and exploring AI and agentic technologies.

This transformation is rooted in a desire to deliver more value to internal clients, to simplify complex systems, and to achieve consistency and auditability across large volume workloads.

After having embarked on a data platform modernisation programme with Telefónica Tech, Eversheds Sutherland sought to evolve from analytics and reporting into agentic AI-driven automation and insights.

Through agentic AI, Eversheds Sutherland is improving business processes that were at times inconsistent, time consuming, and open to human error – relying on static spreadsheets, emails back and forth, and individuals’ knowledge. Eversheds Sutherland wanted to eliminate these pain points to improve the colleague and customer experience.

Eversheds Sutherland has already taken a number of concrete steps to prepare for this transition. Internally, the firm has established an AI task force, invested in AI enablement and training initiatives, and begun trialling AI tools and assistants across parts of the business. These initiatives have helped build awareness and capability, while also highlighting the need for strong governance and oversight in a regulated legal environment.

Customer Quote

“

"Telefónica Tech helped us move beyond the hype surrounding AI and focus on where agentic capabilities can deliver genuine business value. Their structured approach provided us with a practical roadmap for adoption, grounded in governance, measurable outcomes and trusted data foundations."

Susan Chick

Digital Transformation Manager, Eversheds Sutherland

The Solution

Building on solid data foundations

To support the next stage of their transformation journey, Eversheds Sutherland engaged Telefónica Tech to focus specifically on agentic AI readiness. Rather than accelerating directly into deployment, this work was deliberately positioned to ensure that the foundations required for responsible agentic AI adoption were in place.

Eversheds Sutherland worked with Telefónica Tech in a four-week advisory engagement to assess their agentic AI maturity and provide guidance on next steps. The objective was to develop a clear understanding of their current position and identify where agents or automated workflows could deliver the greatest value.

The 4-week engagement covered:

Summary & Purpose
Envisioning & Business Process Mapping
Adoption & Readiness
Recommendations & Next Steps

Identifying Agentic AI use cases in the Legal industry

From the outset, Eversheds Sutherland were clear on what they wanted to achieve. Deliverables included:

Prioritised, viable use cases

Support in validating identified agentic AI use cases and assessing their suitability and overall return on investment.

Clear end-to-end Agentic AI strategy

Eversheds Sutherland has a strong foundation for AI adoption but would benefit from additional structure, guidance, and direction.

Standardised agent design template

Provide guidance on capturing agent requirements and defining the key inputs needed for consistent agent design.

Support and monitoring model

Help Eversheds Sutherland understand what an effective support and monitoring model looks like for agentic AI solutions.

Together, we identified 13 potential use cases for agentic AI to improve efficiency in business services – this spanned Conflict Checking, Finance, Partner Funding, HR, Contract Management, and beyond. Out of these, 3 were selected to investigate and deep-dive into further based on being high impact and low-med effort.

Articulating the ROI of Agentic AI

Using Telefónica Tech’s Prism Framework, Eversheds Sutherland was able to see where these agentic AI use cases sat in the organisation. We visualised each use case on a 3D axis of Customer, Colleague, and Data Maturity, to clearly demonstrate who the use case impacts and when it should be prioritised.

For each agent, we identified Benefits, Risks, Return on Investment (ROI), Agent vs. Automation Recommendation, and Systems Involved. We also provided an Implementation Roadmap.

To calculate a detailed ROI report, we analysed manual work patterns and structural risks to identify Time Saved, Error Reduction, and Scalability, providing Eversheds Sutherland with a figure for value saved over 3 years per agent.

Furthermore, we provided Eversheds Sutherland with a Use Case Identification Template. This template is helping the team structure the use case capture process, calculate potential ROI, and decide on which use cases to take to production.

The Outcomes

Eversheds Sutherland Telefonica Tech Minimised

An evolution of Eversheds Sutherland’s leading data platform strategy

Overall, as part of this agentic AI engagement, Telefónica Tech supported Eversheds Sutherland in:

Reviewing existing analytics and reporting processes to identify where AI-driven automation or augmentation could add value
Assessing how potential agentic capabilities would integrate with the existing data platform architecture
Exploring governance requirements, including risk management, oversight and human in the loop controls
Considering how monitoring, auditability and control would apply to agentic behaviour
Ensuring alignment between data foundations, analytics outputs and emerging AI initiatives

Importantly, this phase is not viewed as a single delivery milestone. Instead, it represents an ongoing evolution moving progressively from analytics automation into AI-assisted insight and, over time, into carefully governed agentic capability where it makes sense for the business.

This approach ensures that any future AI or agentic solutions are not standalone experiments, but a natural extension of the data platform strategy built on trusted data, robust governance, and operational maturity.

Trusted, strategic partnership

Established a strategic partnership with Telefónica Tech for ongoing business transformation.

Best practice agentic AI adoption

Enabled a structured roll out of AI agents using a tailored, templated approach that encourages best-practice, consistency, and quality.

Supporting self-sufficiency

A strengthened Centre of Excellence (CoE) to facilitate self-sufficiency, governance, and ownership.

Customer Quote

“

Telefónica Tech provided valuable expertise during a period of significant delivery pressure and business visibility. They worked closely with our internal team and helped us stabilise and evolve the platform while maintaining momentum on key strategic initiatives.

Naomi Hawker

Head of Data & Analytics, Eversheds Sutherland

Technologies used

Microsoft Power Platform

Telefónica Tech helps organisations build low-code applications, automate business processes, analyse data, and improve productivity using the Microsoft Power Platform.

Microsoft Copilot Studio

Telefónica Tech designs and implements AI-powered copilots and virtual agents with Microsoft Copilot Studio, enabling businesses to automate customer and employee interactions at scale.

Microsoft Teams

Telefónica Tech helps organisations modernise collaboration and communication with Microsoft Teams, delivering solutions for meetings, calling, chat, and hybrid working.

Microsoft SharePoint

Telefónica Tech helps businesses create secure, intelligent intranets and document management solutions with Microsoft SharePoint, improving knowledge sharing and content governance.