The ex-Clifford Chance associate using AI avatars to teach lawyers how to get ahead

At Clifford Chance, Emily Gill spent more than seven years working her way up from trainee to an associate on the banking and finance team. From the outside, it looked like a conventional success story, but over time, she began to question whether she was on the right path.

“I think I knew deep down that it wasn’t really the right thing for me,” she says.

Moving to a US firm or going in-house were framed as the natural options, but neither felt particularly compelling.

Instead, she enrolled on an MBA at Oxford Saïd Business School, a decision that, at the time, felt off-script for a lawyer at one of the world’s top law firms.

“I tried Googling lawyers who had left law to do an MBA, but I couldn’t find anyone,” she says.

Researching skills

At Oxford, she met the person who would become her future co-founder, Bartek Ogonowski, a former Deloitte auditor, and together they began to explore human skills in the workplace more systematically. A shared observation turned into a research project, speaking to more than 250 employers across industries.

“Every single person said this gap is massive and it’s growing,” she says.

Organisations were aware of the importance of human skills, but the way they were being taught had not evolved.

Everyone said they had a couple of old school e-learning modules...

“Everyone said they had a couple of old school e-learning modules or a workshop once a year,” she says.

Those approaches, she realised, rarely led to meaningful change. Skills such as communication, leadership or feedback are built through repetition and application, not passive learning.

“You can’t just turn up at one workshop and be an effective communicator,” she says.

The ‘human skills’ gap

That research eventually led to the founding of LEVRA, a platform that combines assessment, structured learning and simulated practice with human-like AI avatars, allowing users to build human skills over time.

The starting point is self-awareness. Users establish a baseline of their strengths and weaknesses before moving into tailored modules that reflect real workplace scenarios.

“It’s like Fitbit is for fitness,” Gill says, describing how the platform tracks progress and development.

LEVRA covers a wide range of skills that tend to sit just outside formal training but play a central role in day-to-day performance and ultimately, success in the workplace.

“We have 31 human skills, from creating a strong first impression to solving conflict, delegating and presenting well,” she says.

Clients include Deloitte, Grant Thornton, Google and Milbank, reflecting demand across both professional services and law firms.

US firm Perkins Coie has also recently rolled out LEVRA to help junior lawyers practise workplace interactions.

Workplace shifts

The need for this kind of training has become more pronounced in recent years. Even with firms encouraging a return to the office, hybrid working has altered how junior lawyers learn, reducing the informal exposure that once came from being consistently present.

At the same time, senior lawyers have less capacity to coach, and more work now happens asynchronously, giving juniors fewer opportunities to observe how experienced lawyers handle clients and conversations in real time.

The shift towards written communication, through email, Slack and Teams, means many younger professionals have had fewer opportunities to build confidence in real-time interactions, whether that is picking up the phone or speaking with clients and partners in-person.

People aren’t learning through osmosis.

“People aren’t learning through osmosis,” Gill says. “We’ve got so many different ways of communicating: Slack, Teams, in-person and phone calls. How do you manage all of those effectively?”

These training gaps can be difficult to address through the existing training models and are rarely taught formally in school.

The LEVRA platform is designed to provide what Gill describes as a “psychologically safe space where people can practise skills, make mistakes, fail and ultimately, improve”.

Investing in people

For Gill, the goal is not to replace human interaction, but to prepare people for it, a theme she recently explored in her TEDx talk on human skills in an AI-driven world.

Gill argues that AI is a positive development for the workforce, where more mundane tasks will be automated, freeing up humans to do what they do best.

“In a world of AI, our ability to connect, to care, to create meaning and to empathise are the skills that make us uniquely human,” she says.

As firms continue to invest heavily in technology, LEVRA’s premise raises a broader point about priorities.

“You see a lot of people talking about investing in AI tools,” Gill says. “Are you investing as heavily in your humans as you are in technology?”