The guy who built Kirland and Ellis to build AI law firm?

It's one thing to hire a shyster law, but to have a shyster AI bot is ...well bad ass. This guy is going to print money.

This Lawyer Upended ‘Big Law’ Once. He Has a Plan to Do It Again.

David Fox, who helped build Kirkland & Ellis into a top law firm, now sees AI as the industry’s future

David Fox co-founded a legal-tech company that is powering an AI-based law firm.

By Lauren ThomasWSJ

July 26, 2026 7:00 pm ET

Former Kirkland & Ellis partner David Fox co-founded Irving Technology, a software company powering a newly launched AI-based law firm.

David Fox upended the legal industry once before. He hopes to do it again.

The longtime dealmaker is credited with devising the playbook that helped make Kirkland & Ellis the biggest law firm in the world. His new pursuit could one day put him in competition with Kirkland and its peers.

Fox, 68, co-founded a software company, Irving Technology, that is powering a newly launched law firm, called Irving, which employs only a handful of lawyers and primarily relies on artificial intelligence.

“I hope I have one more revolution left in me,” Fox said in an interview.

Fox believes Irving—and similar ventures—could permanently change how legal services are delivered to clients and funded. Elite law firms are just beginning to game out how AI could remake their business models. The need for investment has already prompted many to explore alternative ownership structures, and industry leaders have been debating how the technology could shrink head count or alter fee structures over time.

Fox is in the camp that believes AI will free lawyers from repetitive tasks and let them focus on the thorniest issues. He says clients, in turn, will be charged less money. Irving’s software is at a basic level trained to be about as smart as a high-performing senior-level associate.

Irving will be going up against a bevy of other legal AI upstarts and the major AI developers themselves as well as established firms, each of which have been charting their own futures with AI.

Kirkland & Ellis recently said it set aside $500 million to create its own AI platform rather than rely on tools also used by competitors, while Freshfields struck a deal with Anthropic to co-build specialized AI applications. Cleary Gottlieb bought legal-tech firm Springbok AI, bringing a team of AI engineers in-house.

Several so-called AI-native law firms are already in operation. Many, like Irving, involve two distinct business entities—one housing the lawyers and one housing the technology, which allows for outside investors in the latter.

One called Norm Law, which has hired senior lawyers away from firms including Ropes & Gray and Sidley Austin, is powered by an AI company backed by Bain Capital and Blackstone. Another legal-tech company backed by General Catalyst is behind a new AI-powered firm called Eudia Counsel. Then there are off-the-shelf products such as Harvey, Legora and CoCounsel that are quickly becoming ubiquitous across the industry.

A dealmaker

Fox was born in New York, but his family moved to Israel when he was 9 years old. He moved back to the U.S. in 1983 to launch his legal career at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

Fox worked at Skadden for more than two decades, rising up the ranks to become the firm’s most-senior partner and among the highest-paid lawyers, working on marquee deals including the $6.6 billion leveraged buyout of Toys “R” Us in 2005.

In 2009, he shocked the legal industry by departing Skadden for Kirkland & Ellis, which at the time had only a nascent mergers-and-acquisitions practice. He brought with him Daniel Wolf, a younger Skadden partner on the rise.

Fox, with the help of then-chairman Jeff Hammes, formulated a plan to make Kirkland a juggernaut in M&A. It revolved around resetting the culture at the firm’s New York office and plucking up-and-coming lawyers from other firms. He also steered lawyers to focus on bigger deals.

Fox believes AI will free up lawyers to focus on the thorniest issues.

By 2020, when Fox stepped down from the firm’s executive committee in keeping with the firm’s age limits, Kirkland was working on more deals annually than any other firm. Fox said the new leadership team has since taken Kirkland to even greater heights. Last year, it helped Kirkland become the first law firm to crack $10 billion in annual revenue.

Fox, who now splits his time mostly between Miami and the New York area, says leaving Kirkland was never meant to be a formal retirement. He is keeping busy with projects beyond Irving, including a small venture-capital firm, Antiportfolio Ventures, that makes investments in legal-tech companies such as Sandstone and Patlytics. (Fox’s other partners at the VC firm are Ryan Morgan and Mike Devlin.)

He also finds time for dayslong biking excursions on his collection of motorcycles, and spending time with his wife, who works in furniture design, and their 22-year-old daughter. He is in the early stages of building a center for AI at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem School of Law, where he studied.

The industry’s big question

Irving Technology has raised a small sum of money so far from investors including Narya Capital, the venture-capital firm co-founded by JD Vance before he entered politics, the New York-based venture firm Addition, Hammes and Fox’s Antiportfolio Ventures. Its three other co-founders are engineers with backgrounds at technology and defense companies, including Palantir Technologies.

Irving, the associated law firm based in New York, currently employs fewer than 10 people—a mix of lawyers and engineers—and has been running in stealth for a few weeks now, having already advised on a handful of small deals before its official debut at a later date.

Irving Technology’s software was trained on existing large language models with input from practicing deal lawyers. It is meant to be able to handle tasks such as pulling research or drafting documents, freeing up senior lawyers to focus on winning new business and advising clients.

“A great legal partner’s superpower was always knowing what deserves attention in a deal and what doesn’t,” Fox says.

Fox says he will be involved in the law firm but doesn’t have a defined role and isn’t practicing as a lawyer himself. Over time, he says, he believes the law firm will hire more senior lawyers and work on bigger deals.

Books titled "The Infinity Machine," "Beyond Inheritance" and "For Blood and Money."

Some of the books in Fox's apartment in Manhattan.

Irving and its peers employ a so-called management services organization, or MSO, model, which keeps the legal side separate from the piece that houses technology and any intellectual property. That allows for backing from nonlawyer investors such as private-equity firms. It also sets up the technology firms to eventually go public or pursue other exits, similar to what is happening in the accounting industry.

McDermott Will & Schulte, the culmination of a 2025 merger between big law firms in Chicago and New York, is one of a number of established firms that have been considering converting to an MSO structure, according to people familiar with the matter.

A handful of states, meanwhile, have loosened restrictions barring law firms from taking outside money or are considering doing so. Arizona in 2020 became the first state to eliminate the rules entirely.

Fox says these shifts are “challenging decades-old assumptions about staffing, profitability and client value.”

Still, he said the need for talented lawyers won’t go away: “The question becomes: ‘Do I need 5,000 people who are really talented? Or can I do it with 20 people?’”