Goodwin Joins Big Law AI Arms Race With Venture Funding Tool (Bloomberg Law)

Goodwin seeks to shift one million hours of its lawyers’ time each year to higher-value work through its use of AI, Bloomberg Law reports. That’s roughly 1.5 hours a day for Goodwin’s 3,000 attorneys and business professionals. They would be freed up to help clients navigate complex business issues, develop industry-specific insights, and mentor the next generation of lawyers, according to Anthony McCusker, the firm’s chair. The firm has earmarked about $25 million a year to buy and develop products “designed by lawyers and powered by technology with a real client focus,” McCusker said in an interview. Goodwin, which topped $2.7 billion in revenue last year, joins the pack of top law firms in an AI arms race against longtime competitors and a new crop of legal tech providers and startup firms. Large law firms are looking to leverage their scale and the experience of their lawyers for a leg up. The Goodwin venture financing tool uses a customized version of Anthropic’s Claude platform. It will serve as a template for other practice areas such as M&A, litigation, private equity, and fund formation, McCusker said. The firm’s team of engineers built its own operating system to coordinate the tools with its proprietary knowledge. It’s named “Regina OS” after former chair Regina Pisa. Eric Tan, Goodwin’s chief digital and technology officer, joined in September 2025 to lead the AI effort. For all this to work, Goodwin first needed a common infrastructure. That is Regina, its proprietary operating system, Tan said. “I’ve always had this philosophy: aim small, miss small,” he said. “I was trying to find a practice or an area where we could almost start immediately, and we could almost build immediately and fail immediately.”