In conversation with William Kirtley
Partner at Aceris Law
William Kirtley, partner at Aceris Law, shares how his global experiences shaped his approach to arbitration and why his firm chose Jus AI. Drawing from his time in the Peace Corps and at the UN Tribunal for Rwanda, he reflects on the importance of problem-solving in complex legal environments. He explains how Jus AI enhances efficiency, security, and legal research, why it stands out from other solutions, and what AI means for the future of arbitration.
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How did your time as a Peace Corps volunteer and at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda influence your approach to your current work?
My time at the American Peace Corps and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has certainly affected my arbitration practice. When I was in the Peace Corps, I spent over two years in the Ivory Coast working with municipalities on a variety of challenging projects along with engineers. It impressed upon me the importance of cross-cultural communications, as well as the need to find solutions in very trying circumstances. Lots of problems arose at all times. For instance, there was a coup d’état in the middle of my two years there that overthrew the government, and we needed to find solutions to everything that the municipality was doing in a very different culture.
I think cross-cultural awareness is very important, and the ability to find solutions to challenging problems is something that you also see in international arbitration. At the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, it was very interesting, and you can see the role of justice in solving long-running issues that are obviously very serious. My main takeaway from that, however, is that justice cannot be too slow. There’s the expression: justice delayed is justice denied. You could see that many of the stakeholders at the United Nations, the people who were actually affected by the tribunal, were not impressed with the speed of its work, and they felt that it wasn’t actually addressing their problems.
However, overall, cross-cultural awareness is obviously very important in international arbitration, and the ability to work in multiple languages is also very important.
Aceris Law has been involved in some of the largest international arbitrations globally. How does your firm ensure it maintains its reputation for excellence and innovation in such a competitive field?
Aceris Law maintains its competitiveness in this field by taking, first of all, a very client-centric approach. We work very carefully and closely with our clients, meeting with them often–often using video conferences–and having them as involved as they would like to be in their actual case. We’re entirely transparent with our clients. We share absolutely everything with them, and we let them make all key decisions that impact their case. That’s one aspect.
Now, the second aspect is that we try to make great use of technology in order to speed up our work product and ensure that it’s accurate. We have used AI, along with a variety of other products, to make our legal product fast and cost-effective. We also try to make everything very transparent with our clients. We take a cost-effective approach where we try to set a budget for a case at the very beginning, with cap legal fees, so everything is clear and transparent from the outset with our clients, which avoids any friction that might arise.
Finally, and most importantly, we try to hire only the best lawyers. They don’t necessarily need to have the fanciest credentials, but they must be good at what they do. We tend to hire only internally from people who have been trainees at Aceris Law who have been able to prove their ability to perform very high-quality international arbitration legal work.
How do you see AI shaping the future of arbitration, particularly in terms of efficiency?
There’s no question that AI will impact the future of arbitration, just like it will in many other fields. The primary impact is certain to be time-saving, processing, and efficiency with respect to using AI. There’s no question that AI can perform very basic tasks that would take hours to do in a matter of seconds. Now, the work of AI still needs to be checked, but it can get rid of some of the more humdrum work that used to take a lot of time and used to be billed to clients. This can now be avoided.
What will be very interesting is when you’re able to use the predictive powers of AI with respect to a massive number of documents in order to estimate the manner in which a case is likely to be decided. Now, we’re not quite there yet, but I know that people are working on this–to determine probabilities of case success based on a massive number of documents that have been uploaded.
Obviously, Jus AI is also very useful for summarizing documents, even in its current state, and letting you determine whether certain documents are entirely irrelevant very quickly without necessarily having to read through absolutely everything.
What factors influenced your decision to choose Jus AI over other solutions?
We decided to choose Jus AI rather than other products that are available on the market for a number of reasons.
First of all, in all honesty, it has to do with security. A lot of members of our team were experimenting with ChatGPT or Adobe AI. However, there are questions regarding what happens to the data that’s being uploaded to these platforms. We’re aware that Jus AI is ISO 27001 certified and uses encrypted software, and this allows us to have much greater confidence in uploading documents to the platforms and asking them questions than we can with other platforms. Security was really our first reason.
The second reason is that everything Jus AI does meshes perfectly well with our practice. Aceris Law is focused entirely on international arbitration, international mediation, and public international law, which is precisely what was found in Jus Mundi’s database. Having Jus AI attached to this excellent database of many different resources and being able to link into that was really a no-brainer for us as compared to the other legal solutions that exist.
I believe there’s also Harvey and a variety of other solutions, but we’re quite happy with Jus AI.
Which features of Jus AI have been most beneficial to your practice, and why?
To date, the most beneficial has been the summaries of documents–not because you would necessarily rely upon the summaries that are generated, but to check if this is something you can check off your list and say, “This is irrelevant to what we are seeking, I can move on to new documents.” That’s been our most useful use case.
Jus AI has also been useful in uploading documents and PDFs and asking questions about those documents, knowing that it’s being done in a high-security environment where there’s a really quite minimal risk of document leakage.
Those are the two primary use cases we use for now.
Note: This interview is a transcription of a video interview with William Kirtley shot on January 10, 2025, and edited for clarity and readability. The full interview is available for viewing here.
William Kirtley shares how Jus AI is transforming arbitration at Aceris Law. From secure document analysis to AI-powered summaries and research, Jus AI streamlines legal tasks, saving time while ensuring accuracy. Designed for the complexities of international arbitration, it’s a game-changer for legal professionals looking to work smarter and more efficiently.
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