How Weightmans is using Clarilis automations to turn complexity into consistency

Weightmans is a top 40 UK law firm with more than 1,500 people working across offices in Birmingham, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, London, Manchester, and Newcastle. As well as an established reputation for legal excellence, the firm is also known for its forward-thinking approach to innovation. 

Weightmans has always led the way in innovation, including by establishing an innovation function over 7 years ago. In 2025, the team is a 34-person strong, cross-functional department spanning research and development, innovation, and product management. 

Weightmans’ approach to technology is firmly grounded in solving the real, day-to-day problems faced by the firm’s lawyers and their clients. “We aren’t attracted by shiny things that look good in a demo but don’t work in practice,” says Catriona Wolfenden, Director of Product and Innovation. “Our focus has always been on what actually makes life easier for our lawyers, and what helps them to deliver a more consistent, higher-quality service for our clients.” This pragmatism shapes every technology investment, every project, and every pilot, ensuring they navigate the crowded, expanding and often confusing LegalTech market with purpose and clarity.

The challenge 

Driven by rising client expectations for faster turnaround of drafts and cost transparency, Weightmans, like many law firms, faced persistent challenges with streamlining its drafting processes. This was particularly pronounced in both real estate and M&A – two practice areas characterised by high deal volumes, peaks in demand at certain times of the year and complex documents. 

To streamline the drafting process, document automation was the obvious candidate. However, before you can automate, you need standardised accessible precedents as a ‘base’ upon which to adopt drafting automation.

This was the first issue for Weightmans. Over time, individual preferences and ingrained drafting habits led to a proliferation of subtly different template agreements, with individual lawyers holding strong views on everything from substantive drafting to the use of commas and semicolons. “We ended up with many, many different versions of largely the same documents, just because everybody is very wedded to their own wording,” Catriona explains. It also made supervision more cumbersome, with junior lawyers left using outdated drafts for guidance with little context or support. “Junior lawyers don't necessarily understand another lawyer’s random precedent that made sense to them 15 years ago,” Catriona adds. This problem was further exacerbated by today’s hybrid working practices, where supervision for less experienced team members can be less easily accessible.

Even after agreeing standard precedents (no easy task), the complexity of corporate and real estate documents made automating them internally too resource-intensive and maintenance unsustainable – even with all the automation experience Weightmans’ innovation team has in-house. 

If Weightmans could use a proven automation solution, based on industry-agreed precedents, it would solve both the content and automation issues in one fell swoop. “It just made more sense to buy rather than build,” Catriona explains. “In the same way as we want our legal teams to be free to focus on the right kind of work at the right level, we want our innovation team to be picking up projects where we can really offer value. If we can outsource something that’s already been done well, that frees us up to add value elsewhere.”

The solution

It was critical to Weightmans that any automation solution was market-proven, legally robust, and tailored to the realities of drafting in a fast-paced, commercial law firm. Clarilis stood out for its PSL-led approach to document automation and its ready-to-deploy solutions designed specifically for commercial property and corporate legal teams. The Real Estate Plus and M&A suites both offer a powerful blend of speed of rollout and reliability, combining the efficiency of prebuilt automations and the assurance of being based on industry-standard precedents.

Clarilis’ long-term commitment to keeping the automations accurate and aligned with evolving industry best practices was key. “With Clarilis, it's not like once the automation’s done, nobody ever checks it again,” Catriona explains. “A lot of automation projects fail because they don't have an owner. You might have a keen owner at the beginning of a project, but when you go back to them six months later to ask, ‘are you still happy with this?’ the enthusiasm has waned.” With Clarilis, that risk is irrelevant because its PSL team stays involved, actively maintaining and refining the automations hand-in-hand with its customers and content partners, and in line with legal developments and changes in market standards.

While the consistency and efficiency of the Clarilis solution impressed the Weightmans team, the firm’s highly analytical approach to evaluating innovation investments meant the automations had to prove themselves. Weightmans trialled the platform with dummy data and real-world drafting to see how it performed in reality and under pressure - the automation passed the test. “Clarilis genuinely does what it says on the tin, and that’s rare,” Catriona continued. “The fact that our lawyers, some of whom are more tech-savvy than others, could genuinely use it without having to read a 500-page manual and sit through four hours of training is a really important benefit.”

Value

With Clarilis’ Real Estate Plus and M&A suites in place, automation is streamlining drafting processes, improving consistency, and unlocking capacity in Weightmans’ real estate and corporate teams. Lawyers are no longer duplicating effort or reworking legacy documents – instead, first drafts are generated quickly and to a consistently high quality. This shift has empowered junior lawyers to handle drafting within a controlled and supportive framework, while partners are freed up to focus on higher-value, strategic work.

Internally, Weightmans has implemented robust metrics to track usage of Clarilis and its impact. Taking a data-driven approach is proving to be an effective way to drive adoption. “We don't want to innovate in a vacuum – and we don't want to collect tech that nobody uses,” Catriona explains. The Clarilis solution allows every draft, document, and redraft to be recorded, enabling clear calculations of cost-per-matter based on fee-earner time saved. “This creates a nice little graph that we give to department heads each month,” Catriona explains. “It's really important that the legal teams and operational heads understand this is a cost, and so to make sure that they're getting value for money, they need to make sure that its use is optimised.” 

The reaction from lawyers regarding Clarilis shows that the automation has integrated easily into the firm’s drafting processes. This is largely down to Clarilis’ ease of use and the intuitive interface – features that are equally appreciated by the innovation team. “What's nice from an innovation perspective is we've not spent months answering queries on how to use it,” Catriona adds. The ease of use has significantly reduced the training burden, enabling seamless onboarding and eliminating post-launch firefighting.

Conclusion

The successful deployment of Clarilis at Weightmans is already delivering improvements in drafting efficiency, consistency, and capacity across the firm’s real estate and M&A teams. The ability to show concrete ROI is further strengthening internal confidence and helping secure long-term buy-in across legal teams. 

With these strong foundations in place, Weightmans is now looking ahead, in particular, exploring how LLM-generated content is integrated thoughtfully into Clarilis’ automation products with Clarilis AI Draft. “The fact that Clarilis has thought about GenAI and how it fits into document automation is a really big plus – because whatever we think of it, GenAI is here to stay,” Catriona says. “With Clarilis, we’ve got an automation solution that works solidly and brilliantly now, but we also have the confidence that they are looking ahead, so it will continue to adapt in the future.”