In conversation with Alexander Barnes
Associate at Von Wobeser y Sierra
Von Wobeser y Sierra, a leading arbitration firm in Latin America, is transforming the way it handles disputes with Jus AI. By integrating the suite of AI assistants into its practice, the firm streamlines case investigations, enhances legal strategy, accelerates complex document analysis, and more. With access to Jus Mundi’s vast arbitration and international law database, Von Wobeser y Sierra can quickly identify key arguments, assess arbitrators, and extract critical insights from extensive case materials. By combining AI-driven efficiency with legal expertise, the firm ensures precision, reliability, and a competitive edge in every arbitration case.
Discover Jus AI – your suite of AI assistants designed for arbitration practitioners and international lawyers, streamlining research, drafting, translation, and case analysis with the power of Jus Mundi’s unmatched legal and arbitration database.
Introduce yourself and your firm.
My name is Alexander Barnes. I’m an associate of the Arbitration Practice Group of Von Wobeser y Sierra in Mexico City, Mexico.
Von Wobeser y Sierra is a full-service law firm with 17 ranked practice areas and six industry groups. In the dispute resolution side of the law firm, we deal with all types of business disputes, including commercial litigation, administrative litigation in Amparo, constitutional litigation, including before the Mexican Supreme Court, mediations, class action lawsuits, commercial arbitration, and matters of international investment law.
Our firm, and especially our Arbitration Practice Group, counts on the experience and support of Claus von Wobeser, who is one of the most recognized and experienced arbitrators in Latin America, [as well as] two justices in retirement of the Mexican Supreme Court of Justice. Their support is vital in all complex matters of Mexican law, and their input gives us, in my view, a real seal of approval on the quality of the analysis that we’re providing.
Briefly describe the firm’s focus & approach to leveraging technology.
The firm places innovation and technology at the center of its strategy. It really pervades everything that we do at the firm – from translation operations, document review, eDiscovery, [and] investigations, [including] how we use Jus AI. We even use Specialist CRM software to manage business development and our client relationships.
The firm [also] has a Specialist Innovation and Technology Committee of Partners & Counts, whose remit is to identify technologies that can enhance our practice areas and engage the associates of the firm to test these products and report back to the committee on whether we should contract it or otherwise. We’ve [did] so just yesterday. We were discussing a new AI eDiscovery tool that the firm is considering acquiring for the litigation and arbitration practice groups.
Really, I would say that this sense of innovation is something fundamental to the strategy of the firm going forward, and it’s something that I’ve particularly felt in the past six years of working here.
In 2023, Von Wobeser y Sierra launched VonBot, an internal AI chatbot. What inspired its development?
In October 2023, Von Wobeser y Sierra launched Vonspot, an in-house AI chatbot large language model (LLM). Vonspot can perform three main functions. It can:
- Answer simple questions
- Help us manage more complex questions
- Summarize [the] content that we upload to it
Vonspot is a tool that we developed internally with the firm’s resources generated over the past 30 years and the provisions of Mexican law that are most relevant to our practice. It was inspired by a feeling within the law firm, a strategic philosophy, and [an] approach that the legal industry is evolving and that our clients expect us to make use of these tools to enhance not only the reliability but also the efficiency of our work.
Despite having an in-house LLM, what motivated your firm to adopt Jus AI?
You might wonder why we would contract for Jus AI if we have an in-house LLM that has similar features. The simple answer is that we could not, even if we tried, replicate the quality and extensiveness of the Jus Mundi database. The Jus Mundi database has tens of thousands of documents, awards, court decisions, legal opinions, books, and articles that we rely on every day in our legal analysis and investigations.
Jus Mundi [also] has strategic partnerships with ICC, IBA, and [over 85] local and regional arbitration courts and institutions that contribute their awards and work products to [their] database, making it really a community effort. [Even] if we tried to do that in-house, it would be impossible. We also have to take into account that there are more awards being published, rendered, [and] discovered than ever before. So, to be able to make use of an AI chatbot, [like Jus AI], that can access and process that Jus Mundi database is something that we felt we could not miss out on.
How has Von Wobeser y Sierra used Jus AI to enhance their workflow and decision-making?
Jus AI has had an appreciable impact on the way in which we conduct our investigations and generate our strategies.
We use Jus AI:
- To conduct investigations for our memorials,
- [In] our work products for our clients,
- To identify arbitrators for new cases
- To identify arguments that we think are likely to be more persuasive to arbitrators that we have in existing cases
We also use it to investigate potential expert witnesses for cases and to investigate ways in which we may interrogate opposing counsel’s expert witnesses. From an investigation point of view, Jus AI has been a bit of a game-changer for us.
In terms of document upload, we [see] documents in international commercial arbitrations extending beyond 500 pages, memorials, and expert reports of hundreds of pages. It can be challenging to process such a wealth of information. But with Jus AI’s Upload a Document feature, we can upload very heavy documents, generate summaries of those documents within seconds, probe the document, and ask Jus AI questions about the document.
What’s particularly useful about the Jus AI in that particular respect is that it will not only give you responses to your questions, but it will generate hyperlinks [footnotes] to where in the document it is taking those conclusions from. For us, that is something that makes the Jus AI really of fundamental value.
As a philosophy at the firm, we don’t allow AI to substitute for real analysis, but the intelligent use of AI enables us to take complex ideas, have them be synthesized by AI, and then for us to be able to cross-reference [them] within the document to verify that what Jus AI is telling us is correct.
For us, that gives us a lot of peace of mind, [and] gives us a real sense that we’re using the technology intelligently – that we’re not going to incur any errors by making proper use of the technology.
Note: This interview is a transcription of a video interview with Alexander Barnes shot on January 10, 2025, and edited for clarity and readability. The full interview is available for viewing here.
Alexander Barnes shares how Von Wobeser y Sierra integrates Jus AI to enhance arbitration strategy. From in-depth case analysis to pinpointing persuasive arguments, Jus AI empowers its team with the insights needed to navigate complex disputes efficiently.
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