John B. Quinn, Executive Chairman and Founding Partner of Quinn Emanuel, has revealed that the firm has developed a proprietary AI platform capable of operating in real time during trial proceedings — including assisting with witness examination on the stand. Speaking on the TBPN show, Quinn described a system that ingests the full corpus of a litigation matter: all documents produced in discovery, all testimony and all relevant contracts, organised into a unified platform lawyers can query live.

The use case Quinn highlighted was striking. Mid-trial, with a witness seated, a litigator can ask the AI: "What's the best evidence that so and so just lied about that?" Quinn acknowledged that many suggestions would be unhelpful or already known — but argued the value lies in the outliers. "There will be a couple of gems in there that you might not have thought of — new lines of attack, and that's extraordinarily powerful," he said.

Quinn framed the firm's ambition in pragmatic terms: the goal is not full AI autonomy but a meaningful reduction in the labour burden on lawyers. "Our goal is to get to a point where the AI yields a work product that's like 80% or 90% there," he said — a threshold that would represent substantial efficiency gains on document-intensive, high-stakes litigation where Quinn Emanuel competes. The comments underscore a broader shift among elite litigation firms toward proprietary, in-house AI development rather than reliance on third-party legal tech platforms.