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China’s show of force around Taiwan in a day of massive military exercises has fuelled alarm in Taipei, which wants other democracies to push back harder against Beijing.

The fact that the People’s Liberation Army had 153 aircraft and 36 naval and coastguard ships around Taiwan on Monday, setting single-day records, showed “just how serious the threat to Taiwan was on that day and how big the pressure was,” a senior national security official told reporters on Wednesday.

“We want to remind the international community that peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait is related to global peace and prosperity,” he said. “We also hope that the international community can . . . condemn China for failing to announce its exercises ahead of time in violation of international law and for damaging regional peace and stability by violating the most basic spirit of the UN charter which forbids the threat or use of force to resolve disputes.”

The official added that while Taiwan would do its part to strengthen its defences, like-minded partners needed to help shore up deterrence against Chinese military aggression. Monday’s drills highlighted the importance of regular operations by the US and other militaries to assert freedom of navigation against Chinese attempts to impose control over international waters and airspace, he said.

The plea reflects deepening concern that China’s frequent use and rapid scale-up of military and other coercive moves around Taiwan is bringing it close to being able to launch an attack with little or no warning. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and threatens to annex the country by force if Taipei refuses to submit under its control indefinitely.

Taiwan’s defence minister warned last month that Beijing’s growing operations in surrounding airspace and waters was making it harder to discern when it might be shifting from exercise to war. In briefings to foreign diplomats and reporters, Taiwanese national security officials on Wednesday said Monday’s drills had underscored that risk.

Taipei has long warned of the dangers of Chinese greyzone activity — moves below the threshold of war — close to its borders. The PLA’s air manoeuvres have ballooned from under 20 incursions into Taiwan’s self-declared buffer zone in 2019 to 2,459 this year. Since those sorties are not illegal because they stay outside Taiwan’s sovereign airspace, Taiwan and the US have struggled to counter them.

Under the Taiwan Relations Act, Washington considers any effort to determine Taiwan’s future by non-peaceful means as an issue of grave concern to the US. The law commits Washington to providing Taiwan with defensive weapons and to maintaining US capacity to resist coercion that would jeopardise Taiwan’s security.

US President Joe Biden has repeatedly said the US would come to Taiwan’s help if China attacked. But his administration has narrowed the scope of arms sales to munitions and weapons crucial for fighting an invasion, a policy Taiwanese officials said was weakening the country’s ability to push back against the PLA’s creeping pressure campaign.

Taiwanese military and national security officials believe that Monday’s drills made that problem much worse. “Although we still believe that war is not imminent and not inevitable, their capacity to switch from exercises to war is really strengthening,” the senior official said.

Twenty-five of the 36 Chinese naval and coastguard vessels involved in Monday’s manoeuvres sailed right up to 24 nautical miles off Taiwan’s coast, a line Taipei views as vital to guarding against attacks in sovereign waters.

The threat was exacerbated by Beijing’s clear announcement that it was practising for a blockade of Taiwan’s key ports and military bases. In that sense, the exercises were a step up even from the unprecedented manoeuvres Beijing launched in August 2022 to “punish” Taipei for hosting then-US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Taiwanese officials said.

It was a “misconception” to view Monday’s drills as limited because they lasted only one day or to think that they did not involve live-fire components, the senior official said. “Although they did not launch missiles in Taiwan’s direction this time, they did exercise their missile operations, and they shot two missiles in an inland direction,” he added.

Two western officials said their analysis did not indicate a link between Chinese missile launches and the Taiwan drill. But other foreign officials said the Taiwanese government mentioned the live-fire activity in its briefing on the exercise and said Taiwan assumed a link because they happened simultaneously.

China listed its Rocket Force, the PLA arm in charge of missile operations, as part of the forces participating in the drill but did not announce any missile launch.

The writer is director of clients and communities at RSGI

Business processes with a legal component cause hold-ups far too often — in companies and in law firms, alike. But, where there is a problem, there is usually someone ready to step forward with a remedy.

The organisations listed below are using technology to help remove some of the most common obstacles, to speed up the pace of business. And, in line with the dominant theme of this year’s annual Financial Times Accelerating Business series, many are incorporating artificial intelligence into existing processes.

The FT’s research partner for the series, RSGI, found a range of companies that are helping their clients to apply AI to legal tasks. From navigating new EU legislation to enabling users to conduct legal research faster, some of the potential cost and time savings cited by users are striking. In some cases, legal tasks that previously took days now take minutes.

Where is AI helping in particular? Commercial contracts remain onerous, but users say the technology is speeding up processes. Other core activities where AI is making a difference include procurement and billing for legal services.

Ultimately, widely agreed definitions will be critical to AI’s further deployment in the legal sector: three organisations appear in the list for making headway towards achieving a common standard.

The criteria for inclusion in the FT Accelerating Business series are mainly increased speed: of processes, rate of business, and time required for specific tasks. In the legal context, we also recognise attempts to remove friction from everyday tasks such as commercial contracts. Such efforts involve not only speeding up tasks, but also reducing the stages to go through to do business.  

Speed and efficiency can be expensive, however. For example, the cost of implementing contract management often involves paying for the services of the Big Four professional services firms or other consultancies.

Four general categories emerged from RSGI’s research into the suppliers making notable progress in accelerating the pace of business with a legal component:

Integrating AI use 

ContractPodAi (CPAI)

Legal AI company 

Achievement: Developing an effective partnership strategy with key legal service providers. 

Comment: ContractPodAi signed deals with legal service providers Integreon, Morae and QuisLex to speed up their use of AI. It has also made deals with two of the Big Four professional services firms: PwC, to help it deliver new products; and KPMG, where users across the organisation will be able use CPAI on all legal outsourcing engagements.
Note: ContractPodAi is a sponsor of FT Innovative Lawyers regional reports. Sponsors have no influence over, or prior sight of, any articles in the reports.

D2LegalTechnology (D2LT)  

Legal data consultancy 

Achievement: Helping clients to navigate the EU’s AI Act, the bloc’s landmark law to regulate use of the tech. 

Comment: Businesses recognise that they need more than legal expertise to comply with the new legislation, and are using the data expertise of D2LT to review systems, policies and procedures, to improve AI controls. 

Factor 

Alternative legal services provider  

Achievement: Launching the Sense Collective, a collaborative learning programme for in-house legal teams on AI. 

Comment: The programme includes 17 companies, such as Microsoft, Intel and Adobe. Participants say it has helped them develop step-by-step guides — like recipe books — to using generative AI for a range of problems, which has speeded up implementation. 

Harvey 

Legal AI company 

Achievement: Providing measurable time-savings to legal departments.

Comment: In 2024, US-based Harvey expanded its headcount from 55 to 180 and acquired 100 new customers. One client Repsol, the Spanish energy company, says using Harvey saves each of its users around three hours a week in achieving everyday legal tasks.  

LexisNexis 

Information company

Achievement: Launched Lexis+ AI, its generative AI legal research platform. 

Comment: Law firms in the US, where Lexis+ AI had its first commercial launch, report savings of up to five hours per user a week when using it for legal research, thanks to its ability to summarise information from multiple sources accurately and provide citations.

Leya 

Legal AI company   

Achievement: Established less than two years ago by tech entrepreneurs with no legal background, Leya has already built a solid client base and raised $35.5mn in funding.

Comment: Stockholm-based Leya’s eponymous AI tool is maturing to include workflows built around specific legal tasks. For example, lawyers in private-funds work use the tool to extract key terms from limited partnership agreements in minutes with the same accuracy as a human, who would take hours.  

Thomson Reuters 

Information company

Achievement: Helping in-house teams and law firms take advantage of generative AI.

Comment: This year, the legal team at consumer goods group Unilever has used the technology to speed up the drafting, summarisation and review of hundreds of contracts.
Note: Thomson Reuters is a sponsor of FT Innovative Lawyers regional reports. Sponsors have no influence over, or prior sight of, any articles in the reports.

vLex

Data and AI company  

Achievement: Consolidating its position as an emerging rival to legal information giants Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis. 

Comment: vLex has expanded the capabilities of its AI legal research tool Vincent AI to include analysing and comparing the laws in 13 jurisdictions around the world, having added France, Portugal and Brazil. In addition, it now also covers disputes and transactions. 

Contract times

Deloitte 

Big Four Professional services firm

Achievement: Centralising the global contracting processes for Astellas, the Japanese drugmaker.

Comment: Deloitte harmonised contract templates and processes across the 70 countries in which Astellas operates, which makes signing them 20 per cent faster than before.

Integreon 

Alternative legal services provider

Achievement: Partnering with tech providers to incorporate AI into its services.

Comment: Integreon was the first in its peer group to integrate generative AI into its offerings through partnerships with legal generative AI companies The Contract Network and ContractPodAi. Using CPAI, Integreon was able to complete a migration of 100,000 documents from an old contracting system to a new one within nine months, as opposed to the 20 months projected without the use of AI.
Note: Integreon is a sponsor of FT Innovative Lawyers regional reports. Sponsors have no influence over, or prior sight of, any articles in the reports.

KPMG Law 

Big Four Professional services firm

Achievement: Simplifying the implementation of healthcare recruitment company Acacium’s contract lifecycle management system. 

Comment: KPMG enabled members of Acacium’s legal and contracting team to modify the system themselves. As a result, contracts could be signed 35 per cent faster than before.  

Luminance 

Legal AI company

Achievement: Expanding the number of corporate customers across the world by 75 per cent since the start of 2024. 

Comment: Clients include companies such as AMD, BBC Studios, Rightmove and DHL. Many clients say it is the “go-to” AI provider. One cites an example of receiving a sufficiently accurate summary of the key provisions of a 300-page contract within 45 seconds.

Open Contracting Partnership 

Public procurement reform initiative 

Achievement: Capturing and publicising public procurement data relating to reconstruction projects in Ukraine. 

Comment: The not-for-profit organisation, which aims to improve public-sector contracting, worked with the Ukrainian government to launch Dream: a platform that co-ordinates communities and funders working on reconstruction projects. It estimates the platform can enable projects to start months ahead of schedule. Dream, first launched in mid-2023, now hosts data for more than $5bn-worth of projects. 

PwC Legal Business Solutions

Big Four Professional services firm

Achievement: A first mover in incorporating AI into its offerings for legal-services clients. 

Comment: Created a fixed-cost package for clients, by combining the work of human lawyers and multilingual generative AI tools from ContractPodAi, to streamline both simple and complex contracts. So far, eight clients have benefited from this proprietary model, with savings of 15 to 20 per cent of their usual costs and no need to buy new technology. 

Procurement and billing

Brightflag

Legal costs management 

Achievement: Enabling legal service buyers to understand their legal spending at a glance.

Comment: In-house legal teams can now use Ask Brightflag, an AI-enabled assistant, to monitor their legal spending in greater detail, and much faster, via a chatbot. Some clients have reported substantial cuts in legal costs.

Persuit 

Law firm-sourcing platform

Achievement: Delivering a rapid return on expenditure for new clients.

Comment: Brewing company Heineken says that since adopting the tool last year, it has saved up to 75 per cent of costs on some of its legal work.

Priori 

External counsel management tool

Achievement: Making feedback on external counsel faster and easier.

Comment: Priori helped healthcare company Organon create an easy-to-use scorecard for rating its law firms, with automated reminders for lawyers to make use of it. The result is better feedback to the law firms, resulting in more appropriate responses being made more quickly.  

Standardising legal data

Law Insider 

Contract database

Achievement: Driving the adoption of legal standards to its membership of 3mn registered users.

Comment: Law Insider is launching a set of contract standards and a guide to different uses that will be available for free to any registered user. It will be bolstered by its October acquisition of OneNDA, a free, open-source template for non-disclosure agreements.

Noslegal

Legal data standardisation initiative

Achievement: Adoption of a legal taxonomy by five sizeable law firms, including A&O Shearman.

Comment: The Noslegal taxonomy is a set of standards for use in tagging and analysis of legal data across business such as legal operations, knowledge management, and sales and marketing. The standards are offered as a starting convention that organisations can build on to suit their needs.

Soli

Legal data standardisation initiative

Achievement: Making data standards easier to implement. 

Comment: Soli* (the Standard for Open Legal Information) is a common language for organising, categorising and defining more than 18,000 legal concepts. Rigid adherence to the standards is encouraged to make the transfer of data between organisations as seamless as possible, and adoption is aided by the release of resources such as automated tagging software.

*Formerly Sali (Standards Advancement for the Legal Industry)