In a landmark moment for Pakistan’s legal profession, leading corporate law firm Akhund Forbes has unveiled Conclavity, the country’s first commercial legal artificial intelligence platform built specifically for Pakistani law by Pakistani lawyers.
The launch event, held Wednesday at the Mövenpick Hotel in Karachi, brought together members of the judiciary, in-house counsel, senior figures from banking and industry, and clients of the firm to witness what many are calling a transformative step forward for legal practice in Pakistan.
A Solution Born from a Simple Problem
The case for Conclavity rests on an observation familiar to every Pakistani lawyer who has turned to general-purpose AI tools: they are trained on the internet at large, and the law they know best belongs to jurisdictions most heavily represented online. For Pakistani practitioners, this creates a familiar set of hazards — answers that borrow from English or American doctrine without saying so, citations to provisions that have since been amended or repealed, and, on occasion, authorities that do not exist at all.
Conclavity approaches the problem from the other direction. At its heart lies a maintained database of Pakistani legislation — statutes, ordinances, rules and regulations together with their amendments — allowing the platform to work with the law as it stands in force today, not as it may once have appeared in a training set.
Every answer the platform provides can be traced back to the provision on which it rests, meaning lawyers are never asked to take a conclusion on trust.
What Conclavity Does
The platform is designed to support the three activities that make up the greater part of everyday legal work:
Advisory Work: Conclavity answers questions on Pakistani law with precise statutory references, allowing practitioners to move from a client query to the governing provision in moments rather than hours.
Drafting: It produces first drafts of agreements, notices, board resolutions and other documents that lawyers can then refine, shortening the distance between a blank page and a workable draft.
Review: The platform reads contracts and other instruments against legislation currently in force and flags points where a document departs from, or fails to address, what the law requires.
Built by Practitioners, for Practitioners
Conclavity was developed under the leadership of Rabel Z. Akhund, Advocate and Managing Partner of Akhund Forbes. A graduate of University College London and a solicitor of England and Wales, Akhund practised at leading global law firms in London before returning to Pakistan in 2008 to found Akhund Forbes.
His experience advising on many of Pakistan’s most significant corporate, finance and projects transactions over the past two decades has informed every aspect of the platform’s design.
“Conclavity was conceived and developed in Pakistan, for Pakistani law,” Akhund said at the launch. “Its ambition is not to replace lawyers but to raise the floor, so that the standard of work once available only to those who could pay for the largest firms becomes the ordinary standard. That, in the end, is what access to justice means in practice.”
He added: “Sensible people told us that Pakistan is not ready yet. This is precisely why Conclavity is built the way it is. The product works — it was built here on Pakistani resources by Pakistani lawyers and Pakistani engineers for Pakistani businesses. Conclavity is not a single machine; behind it is a team that works.”
Judicial Endorsement and Industry Support
The launch featured a keynote address by Mr Justice Yousuf Ali Sayeed of the Sindh High Court, who spoke on both the limitations and potential of AI in the legal sphere.
“For years, lawyers and judges alike have dreamt of having that kind of resource, and today perhaps we are at the crux of having realised that dream,” Justice Sayeed observed. He further remarked that “AI too has its limitations, for instance, citing a point as fact when it is not grounded on reality. The approach which Conclavity seems to adopt promises to address this danger by citing only what is verified.”
Mr Nasim Beg of the Arif Habib Group delivered the closing remarks, noting that “AI has again transformed lives and we have seen that around us. But I think human interaction especially in law will continue and, perhaps in a bigger way, because the mundane part could have been taken out of it and then people can apply their minds.”
What Conclavity Is Not
Those who built Conclavity are careful about what it is and what it is not. The platform does not offer legal advice and does not replace the judgment of a qualified lawyer. It is a tool for lawyers and the businesses that depend on them, intended to take on the research and first-draft burden so professional attention can be spent where it matters most.
Confidentiality has been treated as a design requirement rather than an afterthought. The platform has been built as a secure environment suitable for the sensitive material that legal teams handle daily.
A Gradual Rollout
Following the launch, Conclavity will be made available to an initial group of early adopters — drawn principally from in-house legal teams and corporate clients — over the coming months before a wider release. Feedback from that first cohort will shape the platform’s further development, including the expansion of its corpus beyond legislation.
The Significance of the Moment
That Conclavity has emerged from a practising firm, rather than from a technology company approaching the law from the outside, is central to how it has been built: the people who wrote it are the people who will use it.
Akhund Forbes is ranked as a top-tier firm by Chambers & Partners and The Legal 500 and has advised financial institutions, corporations and governments on complex transactions, projects and disputes for close to two decades. The firm regards the launch not as the end of a project but as the beginning of a longer conversation with the Pakistani legal and business community about how the profession ought to work in the years ahead.
With Conclavity, Akhund Forbes is carrying that experience into a new phase of practice — using AI to make legal work faster and more consistent while keeping the law, professional judgment and accountability at its centre.
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