Ice Miller Puts Hebbia to Work Across the Firm
“I have Hebbia open all day. It understands the nuances of the deal work we do in a way that nothing else does.”
Ice Miller is known for adopting tools that reshape the legal industry. Hebbia’s AI-powered platform was no exception. Ice Miller’s Business Group, which handles M&A, private equity, independent sponsor deals, founder and sell-side transactions, and debt and equity financing, decided early to lead on AI rather than chase it. "We decided to lead on AI, and to be thoughtful about it," says Tom Pampush, Chair of the firm's Business Group. "We ran a real analysis of the options, and Hebbia won." The group reviews thousands of pages under tight deadlines and needed a platform that could deliver fast, citation-backed answers across large data sets, valuable to everyone from associate to partner.
Diligence was the clearest place to start. On a recent deal, second-year associate Zenas Shi uploaded a 30-gigabyte compressed file into the platform. Hebbia preserved the folder structure and built a custom Matrix across every agreement, which Shi then tailored to his team's workflow. "What would have been thirty hours of work was cut in half, and I can jump straight to the citation to check every point," Shi says.
The habit spread quickly past first-pass diligence. Dan Durocher, a partner focused on M&A, private equity transactions, and general corporate matters, runs incoming redlines through Hebbia to separate material changes from cosmetic ones, and draws on its integrated SEC data for securities work. For Durocher, the real payoff isn't the hours saved, but where they go. "Our associates are training faster," he says. "They spend less time on busywork and get more reps on the actual legal work."
That shift extends past legal work entirely. Marita Clarke, the firm's Business Practice Group Director, has loaded the firm's own templates into Hebbia and now uses it for the group's practice management and process workflows. "I use Hebbia for everything," she says.
Ice Miller is treating AI as a firmwide capability rather than a single practice's tool. The firm has embedded what it calls a "knowledge management attorney" directly with its practitioners to build custom agents and drive faster adoption. It is also giving AI a standing slot in monthly leadership meetings and putting ethical guardrails in place for client work.
As Ice Miller continues its AI deployment, the firm plans to build custom client playbooks. It will also route institutional knowledge from corporate deals through Hebbia's API into the firm's experience management system, so lawyers can put past negotiations to work on the next one.
