VdA evolves analytics and data with Claranet's Cloud and Generative AI solutions

VdA

With more than 40 years of experience, Vieira de Almeida (VdA) is a leading international law firm specialising in corporate legal advice and stands out for its innovative nature. It provides highly specialised legal services in various areas and industries, such as Environment, Banking & Finance, Data Protection & Technology, Competition & EU, Social Economy & Human Rights, Health, among others.

VdA has grown in line with the opening up to the world and the development of the national economy, having increased significantly in size since the late 80s, with Portugal's admissionto the European Union, growing from an office of six lawyers to a firm of around 550 people.

VdA Legal Partners reflects the firm's international presence and commitment to supporting clients on a global level. In-depth knowledge of local markets, together with a specialised legal practice, characterises the firm's presence in seven jurisdictions - Angola, Cape Verde, Equatorial Guinea, Mozambique, Portugal, São Tomé and Príncipe and East Timor.

The challenge

The inevitability of the transition to the Cloud had been felt for some time, and VdA had already been travelling this path progressively, exploring and adopting not only vertical solutions native to the Cloud, but also developing proprietary applications based on Cloud resources.

In recent years, especially with the emergence of Covid-19, the urgency of the transition has become even more evident. This pressure, combined with the growing obsolescence of certain technological components of VdA's architecture, has led the firm to start an accelerated migration programme to the Cloud, focused on projects of value to the business and not just technological needs.

Considering that the continuous development of VdA's operations was in progress, it became essential to rely on experienced and competent technology partners to lead this evolution.

Claranet stood out in VdA's search for partners due to its wide range of services and multi-skilled / multi-technology team.

Rui Alves, CIO | VdA

Cloud

The requirements

Power On (VdA's digital transformation programme) was the driving force and catalyst behind this migration, beginning in 2021. VdA started by establishing the areas (business macro-processes) in which it would operate and prioritising them. After an initial survey of requirements, VdA carried out a market study to identify vertical solutions that met most of the requirements and base technologies that were Cloud native, market leaders (nationally and internationally) and as integrated as possible with VdA's overall architecture, in order to avoid the proliferation of base technological components / different suppliers.

In this context of integration, having a solid, robust and scalable base for data management and exploitation became a fundamental part of the technological architecture. The advent of ChatGPT in 2022 and the growth in the use of Generative AI in general accelerated the need to migrate to the Cloud in order to keep up with the technological innovation taking place around the world. Claranet was naturally the partner selected to accompany the firm in this evolution.

The solution

Based on Cloud Microsoft Azure, the Power On programme encompasses ERPs and tailor-made solutions, taking advantage of the platform's latest developments such as integration with Dataverse and the use of Graph (connection to Office 365), components of Power Platform and Fabric.

As part of the overall solution, Claranet supported VdA in two strategic components for the success of the project: the migration of the firm's analytics, based on an on-prem solution, to Fabric; and the exploration of various Generative AI use cases, in artificial intelligence APIs, based on Azure Cognitive Services and OpenAI.

The project to migrate analytics to the Cloud was based on the assumption that only the existing functionality and metrics would be maintained, so as not to add more complexity to the already large project. However, this migration changed the entire paradigm of VdA's analytics - from a daily batch process to near real time and, in the near future, to real time (with more metrics and indicators, some of which would not be possible with an on-prem solution).

In this project, Claranet provided support from the definition of all the component architecture in the Fabric environment to the actual data migration - including all the transposition of the metrics to Datalake/PowerBI base technology.

Claranet was a technology partner in the truest sense of the word. Both technological bases were completely new - Fabric itself had not yet been officially launched at the start of the project - and both parties took the risk of moving forward together.

Rui Alves, CIO | VdA

The GenAI project began with the creation of an internal chat based on LLMs (Large language models), to run within VdA's Azure tenant, in order to more adequately address the risks of confidentiality and privacy of information. Various experiments and explorations of GenAI's potential were carried out on VdA documentation.

In this project, Claranet also helped define the entire component architecture, from configuring the Azure resources needed to meet VdA's technical and security requirements, to implementing the various MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) associated with the use cases implemented.

Data & AI

The benefits

VdA's projects with Claranet have provided a technological base with enormous potential for evolution. Data and AI will be a key driver for VdA's business in the future.

The most immediate benefits are qualitative: the analytics solution in the Cloud has led to an improvement in processes and their integration, as well as in data quality and access to information, which is now fully democratic (within the rules of information governance) and up-to-date.

With the Generative AI project, a significant part of VdA's employees are using the solution. The aim is to keep up with market developments and benefit wherever possible, without jeopardising safety issues and the quality of customer service.

The future

The projects implemented at VdA in partnership with Claranet are aimed at transforming various business processes, as well as providing a technological platform that is easily scalable and where it is possible to capitalise on the benefits of new updates and tools.

Other knowledge-focused initiatives are already underway, which will integrate functionalities leveraged in these implemented solutions / technologies. The solutions proposed by Claranet have paved the way for the evolution of this project, whose future paths have yet to be explored.

VdA's future clearly lies in these areas of analytics and GenAI (among other potential AIs). Both for the success of these projects and for the know-how and professionalism demonstrated, Claranet will certainly continue to be part of VdA's future.

Rui Alves, CIO | VdA