Josefin Nowén Wirkkala: EQT Launches 40X Return to Prepare Its Lawyers For an AI Future

Q. You’ve been at EQT for more than a decade. Explain the background to your 40X Return project and why it aims to reinvent how EQT’s legal team operates.

Josefin Nowén Wirkkala: When I stepped into this position at the beginning of July 2025, I saw an opportunity to shape a clear global legal strategy.

I started by listening. Pretty quickly, a clear picture emerged. It became evident that, from a strategic perspective, our lawyers were focused on the same themes, just expressed in different ways: the use of AI, legal development, legal operations, the management of our legal panel, how we manage and explain cost, and how we measure our output (KPIs). We grouped these into six strategic pillars, designed to work together to create a future-ready legal ecosystem.

Among these, AI quickly emerged as the most transformative pillar. By summer 2025, its impact was already clear, and we made a deliberate decision to prioritize it.

AI is not just another initiative; it’s the shift most likely to change how legal work is delivered. It has the potential to alter cycle times, improve consistency and expand capacity while amplifying the work of EQT’s strong team of legal professionals. Importantly, it’s a pillar you can build around. Once AI becomes the core, it naturally shapes the other priorities, including how we design our workflows, how we partner with law firms, how we manage costs, and how we measure impact, bringing all these elements together in a much more coherent, scalable way. Faster and closer to the business to support growth.

Q. Within that context, explain how the 40X Return project works.

Josefin Nowén Wirkkala: At EQT, we’re focused on creating value that creates more value, so that we build capabilities that generate returns repeatedly over time. We wanted to apply that logic to how global legal operates and position the team as a strategic multiplier in its own right.

The structure of 40X return is intentional: forty in-house lawyers each contribute practical, repeatable legal AI use cases to a platform developed by EQT portfolio company Harvey. These could include non-disclosure agreement reviews, fund term trackers, deliverables in the fundraising cycle, share purchase agreements and co-invest analysis and benchmarking, and more. AI produces first drafts, benchmarking and markups instantly. This results in shorter turnarounds with higher-quality outputs and cost savings.

On its own, a single use case in the global legal team may represent an incremental efficiency gain. But when those insights are captured, shared and standardized across EQT, they compound. Individual improvements become collective capability. That is the multiplier effect.

40X return is already scaling. The program has expanded from an initial 40 internal use cases to an additional 40 external ones in cooperation with our partner law firms. We take an end-to-end view, mapping each legal document in, for example, a fundraise or M&A transaction and ticking it off as an AI use case either internally or externally. This structure will continue to evolve, with increasing automation of documents and workflows, enabling true scalability without a proportional increase in headcount or legal spend.

In that sense, 40X mirrors the private equity value-creation thesis. We are investing in our own operational model: identifying high-impact interventions, scaling them, and allowing the returns to build over time. It is not about one-off experimentation. It is about embedding organizational learning and making it systematic.

Q. When it comes to AI and technology more broadly, how do you balance innovation with pragmatism, particularly in a fast-moving market?

Josefin Nowén Wirkkala: We’re not a firm that will wait. Some lawyers may want to keep working as they do today for some more time, then switch to a more mature AI tool and start using it, but that’s not our mentality. If others are waiting, we’d rather have spent that time building capability, learning what works and what doesn’t work, and being ready to scale.

The way we balance that with pragmatism is by being deliberate rather than reactive. The market is moving fast, so we don’t chase every new development; we focus on tools and applications where there’s a clear use case and a clear fit with our operating model.

We also separate experimentation from the business-critical work. We’re not testing new tools in live transactions or fundraisings on day one. That’s why we’re building defined use cases and capabilities in Harvey on the side, in a controlled way, so it doesn’t disrupt delivery. And we use our partner law firms as part of that ecosystem too: to stress-test approaches and learn together.

We stay platform-aware, the AI landscape is evolving rapidly, and we ensure we adopt the most suitable capabilities available at any given point.

So, it’s really a combination of discipline and momentum: measure impact, share learning across the global legal team, scale what works, and be honest about what doesn’t. And throughout, we keep the governance and risk awareness you’d expect from a strong legal function.

Q. What does “success” look like for EQT’s legal function in a few years’ time, and what should others in the industry take away from what you’re doing?

Josefin Nowén Wirkkala: Success for me starts with recognizing that this is a living legal strategy. It’s not a project with a start and end date that gets launched and then forgotten. We will revisit it every year, refine the six strategic pillars if needed, adjust to market shifts we can’t yet predict, and continue building alongside EQT’s evolution. The mindset is long-term and iterative.

In the short to medium term, success is already visible in the shift in mindset. The fact that the global legal team has come together and that everyone works with the six strategic pillars, and that the lawyers are actively developing legal AI use cases is itself progress. Getting lawyers to think differently about how they plan their work, measure impact, and use technology is, according to us, a fundamental change.

There are also clear operational measures of success: greater efficiency, better cost management, stronger collaboration with partner law firms, and more transparency around what we do and the value we create.

But over the longer term, success is more structural. As technology reshapes how legal work is done, our already stellar in-house lawyers will become even more strategic, analytical, and integrated with the business. If we get this right, we’re not just making the legal function more efficient; we’re elevating it. EQT is setting its standard for what in-house legal looks like going forward.