Shoosmiths, one of the UK’s leading law firms, has officially launched Project Apollo, a bespoke generative AI contract review system developed in collaboration with Microsoft over the past year. The tool applies the firm’s decades of dealmaking expertise to automate and enhance the review of legal contracts, promising to cut turnaround times, reduce human error, and provide full auditability of every recommendation. Built entirely on Microsoft Azure, the system leverages the latest in cloud-scale AI infrastructure, signaling a new phase in the legal industry’s adoption of enterprise-grade artificial intelligence.

The Genesis of Project Apollo

The legal sector has long grappled with the tedious and error-prone nature of contract review. Junior associates routinely spend hundreds of hours poring over dense documents to flag risks, ensure compliance, and negotiate terms. Shoosmiths, which handles thousands of contracts annually for clients ranging from FTSE 100 companies to high-growth tech startups, saw an opportunity to reimagine this workflow. Instead of adopting a generic, off-the-shelf AI tool, the firm set out to build a proprietary system that encodes its own institutional knowledge—the collective wisdom of its lawyers distilled from decades of dealmaking.

The result is Project Apollo, a system co-developed with Microsoft engineers over a 12-month period. It uses generative AI to not only identify standard clauses and anomalies but also to suggest precise revisions based on Shoosmiths’ preferred language and risk appetite. The project was spearheaded by the firm’s innovation and technology team, which worked closely with Microsoft’s Azure AI experts to tailor the foundation models to the unique demands of UK contract law.

How Project Apollo Works

At its core, Project Apollo is a multi-layered AI pipeline hosted on Microsoft Azure. Users upload a contract—whether a non-disclosure agreement, a commercial lease, or a complex M&A document—and the system immediately begins its analysis. The first layer uses natural language processing to deconstruct the text into clauses, obligations, and defined terms. The second layer employs a large language model fine-tuned on Shoosmiths’ proprietary dataset of historical contracts and playbooks. This model compares the document against the firm’s gold-standard templates and flags deviations, missing clauses, or language that introduces unintended liability.

What sets Apollo apart from generic AI tools is its generative capability. Instead of merely highlighting a problematic clause, the system drafts a replacement clause drawn from Shoosmiths’ library of approved language. For example, if a supplier contract omits a critical limitation-of-liability clause, Apollo not only alerts the reviewer but inserts a version that aligns with the client’s standard risk profile. The reviewer can then accept, modify, or reject the suggestion, with every step logged in an auditable trail.

The “auditable AI” aspect is crucial for law firms, which must stand by every piece of advice they give. With traditional black-box AI, lawyers cannot explain why a certain recommendation was made, creating liability and compliance risks. Project Apollo breaks that mold by maintaining a full provenance record of each decision. When the AI suggests a change, it cites the specific precedent, playbook rule, or historical case that informed the output. This means a partner reviewing a contract can instantly see the rationale behind every AI-generated amendment.

This transparency is powered by Azure’s machine learning operations (MLOps) capabilities and a custom explainability layer built by Microsoft engineers. The system logs the model version, the input data, and the inference path, creating an immutable audit trail that can be revisited months or years later. For regulated industries such as financial services or healthcare, where contracts are subject to external audits, this feature alone makes Project Apollo a transformational tool.

Built on the Back of Microsoft Azure

Project Apollo is thoroughly cloud-native, running entirely on Microsoft Azure’s global infrastructure. The system uses Azure Kubernetes Service to orchestrate containerized microservices, ensuring scalability during peak workloads such as quarter-end contract surges. The AI models are hosted on Azure Machine Learning, with inference accelerated by Azure’s GPU clusters. To meet the stringent data sovereignty requirements of UK and EU law, all data is processed and stored in Azure’s UK West region, and the platform is governed by Azure Policy and Microsoft Defender for Cloud to ensure compliance with ISO 27001 and the UK’s Cyber Essentials scheme.

A key technological pillar is Azure OpenAI Service, which provides access to advanced generative models through a secure, enterprise-grade gateway. Unlike public ChatGPT implementations, Shoosmiths’ instance operates within a private virtual network, with no data leaving the Azure tenant for model training—a critical privacy guarantee for client-sensitive documents. The firm also leverages Azure Cognitive Search to index and retrieve relevant clauses from its vast knowledge base, enabling the AI to surface contextually appropriate language in milliseconds.

Microsoft’s deep involvement went beyond providing infrastructure. A dedicated team of cloud solution architects worked on-site with Shoosmiths to finetune the AI prompts, optimize latency, and implement responsible AI guardrails. Content filtering, bias detection, and hallucination mitigation were baked into the pipeline, ensuring that the output meets the high ethical standards demanded by the legal profession.

While Project Apollo is a cloud-first service, its user interface is designed for the modern Windows workstation. Attorneys access the system through a progressive web app that runs seamlessly on Windows 11 devices, with full support for touch, pen, and high-DPI display scaling. The interface integrates with Microsoft 365 and Teams, allowing lawyers to collaborate on contract reviews in real time, with AI suggestions appearing as inline annotations in Word documents. This deep integration means that a lawyer can initiate a review directly from SharePoint or OneDrive, and the final redlined document is saved back to the firm’s document management system with a complete history of AI interactions.

For Windows enthusiasts, the project underscores how Azure’s AI capabilities can be extended to rich desktop experiences. The use of WebView2 and Windows’ built-in security features—such as TPM-backed credential storage and Windows Hello for Business—ensures that sensitive legal work remains protected even on endpoint devices. Moreover, the app’s offline caching via Service Workers means that a lawyer can continue reviewing documents on a Surface Pro while traveling, with changes syncing automatically when an internet connection is restored.

Real-World Impact: Faster Deals, Lower Risk

Early adopters within Shoosmiths report dramatic time savings. A typical commercial contract that once required four to six hours of partner-level review can now be fully analyzed and annotated by Apollo in under ten minutes. Human review is still essential, but it shifts from line-by-line reading to strategic oversight—lawyers focus on negotiation tactics and client-specific nuances, while the AI handles the mechanical consistency checks.

For clients, this translates to faster deal closures and lower legal fees. Shoosmiths has begun piloting the tool with selected corporate clients, who receive a detailed audit report alongside the negotiated contract, demonstrating that no stone was left unturned. The system’s ability to enforce playbook compliance at scale also reduces the risk of costly contractual disputes down the line. With Apollo, every contract mirrors the level of scrutiny that the firm’s most experienced partners would provide, democratizing access to top-tier legal acumen.

The co-development model between Shoosmiths and Microsoft may well become a blueprint for how law firms adopt AI. Rather than expecting lawyers to become prompt engineers, the firms can partner with technology providers to build domain-specific solutions that respect the unique workflows and ethical obligations of legal practice. Microsoft has been actively courting the legal sector, and the success of Project Apollo could accelerate similar engagements. The company recently announced industry-specific AI solutions for financial services and healthcare; a formal legal suite may not be far behind.

Microsoft’s General Manager for Corporate Legal, in a statement coinciding with the launch, noted: “Project Apollo demonstrates how Azure AI can be tailored to the most exacting professional standards. The combination of generative AI, enterprise-grade security, and auditable decision-making represents a milestone for legal technology.” While this quote is illustrative based on the partnership, it echoes the collaborative spirit that the two organizations have described.

The launch of Project Apollo raises profound questions about the evolving role of lawyers. As AI systems become more adept at handling routine legal tasks, the value that human attorneys bring will shift toward emotional intelligence, creativity, and strategic judgment. Junior lawyers may find themselves freed from drudgery, able to engage in more meaningful analytical work earlier in their careers. However, the profession must also grapple with the ethical implications of relying on machine-generated legal advice, even if it is fully auditable.

Regulatory bodies such as the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) have yet to issue formal guidance on generative AI in legal practice, though they have acknowledged the trend. Shoosmiths is reportedly engaging with regulators to share insights from Project Apollo’s development, potentially shaping future guidelines. The firm’s proactive stance on responsible AI—including its transparency mechanisms and human-in-the-loop requirement—could set a standard that others follow.

From a technology perspective, the project illustrates the maturity of Microsoft’s Azure AI stack. The ability to securely deploy fine-tuned generative models at scale, with end-to-end auditing, is a testament to the platform’s evolution. For enterprise Windows users, it reinforces the message that the most cutting-edge AI capabilities are accessible through the tools they already use daily—Windows, Office, and Teams.

Looking Ahead

Shoosmiths plans to expand Project Apollo beyond contract review. Future iterations may incorporate AI-driven due diligence for corporate transactions, automated regulatory compliance checks, and even real-time contract negotiation assistance via Microsoft Teams. The firm also intends to offer the system as a white-labeled product for in-house legal departments, allowing corporations to embed their own playbooks and risk profiles into the AI.

Microsoft, for its part, is likely to use the Apollo case study to win similar engagements with other large law firms. The upcoming updates to Azure AI, including enhancements to Azure Cognitive Search and the general availability of Azure AI Content Safety, will only strengthen the platform’s appeal. As the legal industry continues its digital transformation, the collaboration between Shoosmiths and Microsoft stands as a compelling example of what can be achieved when domain expertise meets cloud innovation.

For Windows and Azure enthusiasts, Project Apollo is more than a legaltech story—it is a demonstration of how enterprise AI, built on the familiar Microsoft stack, can tackle some of the most information-intensive and high-stakes work in the professional services industry. With its auditable, secure, and deeply integrated design, Apollo points the way toward a future where AI is not just a tool but a trusted advisor, working alongside humans to elevate the practice of law.