AI and legal technology consultancy.
Legal technology deployed inside a top 20 UK law firm and alongside in-house teams. For law firms and legal functions that have bought the tools and want the returns: benchmarking, selection, governance, adoption, and hands-on build.
Get in touchVesta can help you get the most out of technology in legal services and deliver genuine impact.
What I do
AI strategy
Practical strategy grounded in what the technology can do today.
Tool selection
From a noisy market to a confident decision. Tech-agnostic with no vendor commissions - get the best tool for your situation.
Implementation & adoption
Most rollouts fail on planning and people, not the technology. I can help fix the rollout.
Training & AI literacy
Hands-on sessions that get lawyers using AI on real work, from first steps to advanced agents and workflows.
Governance
Policies, approval frameworks and safe self-service - learned from experience in practical delivery of AI in law.
Build & prototyping
Working prompts, workflows or prototypes that prove value and can be used to drive imagination.
Who I help
Law firmsAI strategy, tool selection and adoption for firms that want results rather than headlines.
Strategy days, innovation function audits, use case roadmaps, vendor selection and structured pilots. I have sat on the firm side of every one of these conversations, so the advice starts from how firms actually make decisions - partnership dynamics, pricing pressure, risk appetite and all.
In-house legal teamsPractical help for legal teams at corporates - from a first AI roadmap to full implementation.
Legal operations health checks, technology selection, implementation support, playbooks and training. Sized for teams from a solo GC to a large department, and honest about what you need versus what the market wants to sell you.
ALSPs & AI-native firmsBuilding AI into legal service delivery - or building a legal business around AI from day one.
Alternative providers and new-model firms move faster than traditional firms, and the advice needs to keep up. Service design, delivery workflows, agent-based processes, eval and quality frameworks, and the build work to make it real. I can support genuinely making AI-native lawyers while still allowing them to deliver on the day to day.
Consultancies & delivery partnersSenior outsourced delivery for legal engineering and consulting teams that need extra hands.
Project-based delivery under your brand or mine: workflow builds, prompt and playbook engineering, implementation sprints and client workshops. A senior practitioner who can run a workstream end to end, with no onboarding overhead.
Legal tech vendorsBuyer-side insight for vendors selling into law firms - from someone who ran the buying.
I spent years on the other side of your pitch: heading R&D and running the tool assessment and procurement function inside an award-winning innovation team, seeing hundreds of vendor pitches and pilots. I help vendors understand how firms actually buy - who really makes the decision, what evaluations test, why pilots stall, and how infosec and pricing land - plus product roadmap support grounded in what legal buyers and users actually need next. Supporting you to turn an innovation team into your internal champion.
Been there. Built that.
I'm Mike Kennedy. I have spent over a decade putting technology into legal work at a top 20 UK law firm, starting as a paralegal and qualifying through one of the first hybrid legal technology training contracts. I joined the firm's newly formed innovation team on qualification and ended up running research and development.
The job covered horizon scanning for the firm and its clients, every technology pilot and procurement decision, and the buy and build strategy behind them. I supported the firm's AI and LLM strategy, was instrumental in the prototype of its internal LLM assistant and took it through to production and firmwide adoption, and ran its AI governance committee. More recently I focused on reimagining M&A due diligence around AI, and co-authored The RAG Report, an industry-first published study of how LLMs perform on that work.
Alongside that, as part of a legal technology consultancy offering, I advised general counsel and their in-house teams on their own technology programmes, including major financial institutions and FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 clients. In 2024 I was awarded Innovation Trailblazer at the ALM Legal Innovation and Technology Awards.
Vesta is the independent version of that job. I work across strategy, tool selection, implementation, training and governance, and if the answer is a working prototype, I can build that too.
Firmwide AI rollout
Delivered the rollout of GenAI at a top 20 UK firm - developing and launching an internally built firmwide AI assistant, and bringing in AI solutions through a buy-and-build hybrid strategy.
Due diligence
Direct delivery of large-scale AI due diligence projects from 2016 onwards, and worked closely with lawyers to re-design the M&A process.
Research
In-depth studies and benchmarking on LLM performance in legal due diligence.
Hands-on builder
Prototypes, agent workflows and evaluation harnesses - can deploy working solutions, not just recommendations.
I believe that advice from people who can (and do) the job themselves delivers better results.