Kirkland has partnered with Palantir on a platform designed for private equity fundraising and fund formation work.
The launch comes just a week after Kirkland unveiled plans to invest $500 million building its own AI tools, underlining the firm's aggressive push into AI.
Kirkland & Ellis has partnered with data intelligence giant Palantir to launch its own tech platform designed to streamline private equity fundraising in the latest sign of the firm's increasingly ambitious AI strategy.
The platform will be used for fund formation work, helping manage fundraising documents, draft investor side letters, track obligations and ongoing compliance.
The launch comes just a week after Kirkland announced plans to invest $500 million over several years building its own AI tools.
Fund formation in focus
Fund formation has become a key focus area for legal AI, with startups and established legal tech players launching tools aimed at parts of the fundraising process.
Kirkland is considered the market leader in funds work. The firm said it advised on nearly $500 billion of capital raised, or targeted, by fund clients last year alone.
Rather than relying on off-the-shelf legal AI tools, the firm said it has partnered with Palantir to build software around its own institutional knowledge and workflows,
Palantir, led by CEO Alex Karp, specialises in connecting large and complex datasets through what it calls an “ontology” - a model that maps how different pieces of information relate to one another.
The system is designed to organise information that has traditionally been spread across lawyers, documents and spreadsheets into a centralised platform for managing the fundraising process.
Palantir counts governments and major institutions among its biggest clients, including the US Department of Defence and the NHS in the UK.
What they said
Erica Berthou, a partner and member of Kirkland's executive committee, said private equity fundraising had become significantly more complex and required fund managers to manage "enormous volumes of information" across legal and commercial frameworks.
Palantir chief legal officer Ryan Taylor said the partnership was aimed at creating an "enterprise operating system" for private equity fundraising that could continuously improve over time.
“Together, we are disrupting the global fundraising market,” he added.
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