Linklaters Wins Financial Times’ Most Innovative Lawyers in North America Award for Pioneering AI Transactions
The recognition honors a series of groundbreaking AI transactions led by Ieuan Jolly, Partner and Chair of Linklaters’ U.S. TMT/IP & Data Solutions practice. These landmark deals established a novel licensing framework that helped publishers unlock the value of their digital content, while enabling AI vendors to gain access to curated, valuable digital assets to train and enhance GenAI models. Navigating uncharted legal and commercial challenges, the innovative approach bridged the publishing and AI sectors, aligning legal, technical, and business objectives to drive transformative change for both GenAI developers and digital platforms.
Ieuan commented:
“Publishers around the world are sitting on a goldmine of digital content — untapped assets that can be leveraged for significant revenue through licensing to AI developers. By enabling AI vendors to use this content for training models, enhancing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and fine-tuning large language models, publishers can turn data into dollars. These deals are legally and technically complex, but they offer a transformative opportunity to monetize content in ways that were previously unavailable. This evolving blueprint is reshaping the future of media and AI, creating new pathways for value in both industries."
Linklaters has one of the largest global teams of AI lawyers, delivering comprehensive legal services to the innovators, investors, and corporations across all sectors driving the AI revolution. Linklaters’ support spans the entire AI ecosystem — from advanced large language models and AI-powered software to essential hardware, cloud AI solutions, and AI data centers — advising on all the technical, legal, and regulatory complexities of building, implementing and scaling AI.
The FT Innovative Lawyers Awards are among the most prestigious legal awards in the region, recognizing lawyers, law firms, and in-house legal teams that are at the forefront of innovation. Winners were honored at a ceremony in New York on December 9th.
