{"id":151941,"date":"2025-11-21T13:05:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-21T13:05:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/151941\/"},"modified":"2025-11-21T13:05:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-21T13:05:10","slug":"leading-law-firm-cuts-london-back-office-staff-as-it-embraces-ai-artificial-intelligence-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/151941\/","title":{"rendered":"Leading law firm cuts London back-office staff as it embraces AI | Artificial intelligence (AI)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The law firm Clifford Chance is reducing the number of business services staff at its London<\/a> base by 10%, with the increased use of artificial intelligence a factor behind the decision.<\/p>\n

The head of PwC<\/a> has also indicated that AI may lead to fewer workers being hired at the accountancy and consulting group.<\/p>\n

Clifford Chance, one of the largest international law firms, is making about 50 roles redundant in areas such as finance, HR and IT with role changes for up to 35 other jobs, according to the Financial Times<\/a>, which first reported the cuts.<\/p>\n

Greater use of AI and reduced demand for some business services are behind the cuts, the FT report said, as well as more work being done at offices outside Clifford Chance\u2019s main UK-US operations, in countries such as Poland and India.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for Clifford Chance said: \u201cIn line with our strategy to strengthen our operations, we can confirm we are proposing changes to some of our London-based business professional functions.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe proposed changes could see the creation of new roles, changes to the scope of roles, revised team structures and in some cases a reduction in roles.\u201d<\/p>\n

White-collar, or office-based jobs, are commonly cited<\/a> as being vulnerable to advances in AI, the term for computer systems that perform cognitive tasks typically associated with human intelligence.<\/p>\n

skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n

Sign up to Business Today<\/p>\n

Get set for the working day \u2013 we’ll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning<\/p>\n

Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n

AI is able to help employees perform some tasks faster \u2013 such as coding, research, scheduling meetings and reviewing contracts \u2013 and experts believe that companies will consider banking those productivity gains by hiring fewer people, or cutting staff numbers as systems become capable of handling certain tasks autonomously<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Four in 10 (41%) bosses told a recent survey of 850 business leaders<\/a> that AI was allowing them to cut the number of employees. The British Standards Institution poll spanned seven countries: the UK, the US, France, Germany, Australia, China and Japan.<\/p>\n

The global chairman of PwC, Mohamed Kande, said the firm would no longer be hiring 100,000 people over a five-year period \u2013 a target set in 2021 \u2013 because of the advent of AI, indicating that entry-level jobs could be affected.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we made the plans to hire that many people, the world looked very, very different,\u201d he told the BBC. \u201cNow we have artificial intelligence. We want to hire, but I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s going to be the same level of people that we hire \u2013 it will be a different set of people.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, Kande added that PwC was struggling to recruit AI specialists. \u201cWe are looking for hundreds and hundreds of engineers today to help us drive our AI agenda, but we just cannot find them,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The UK head of PwC said in September<\/a> that AI was \u201ccertainly reshaping roles\u201d but that a drop in graduate recruitment at the firm this year was due to a slowdown in economic activity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The law firm Clifford Chance is reducing the number of business services staff at its London base by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":151942,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-151941","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151941\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/151942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}