How Law Firm Noerr turned an eight-week Open WebUI rollout into 600+ active users in week one

Overview #

Noerr built NoerrGPT, a secure AI workspace for the whole firm, on Open WebUI inside its own Azure subscription. It speeds up legal work while keeping full control over data, models and compliance.

At a Glance #

• Industry: Legal services
• Company size: 1,000–4,999 employees, including more than 450 advisors
• Deployment: Noerr’s own Azure subscription, with EU-only data residency
• Models: Azure OpenAI GPT-6-Luna and GPT-6.1-Sol; AWS Anthropic Opus-5.5 and Sonnet-5
• Time-to-deploy: 8 weeks from project start to rollout
• Usage: More than 600 employees active in the first 7 days; daily active usage stabilized at 60–70% of licensed seats in the first two weeks
• Key results: Unique users in the first week equaled the previous platform’s monthly unique users

About Noerr #

Noerr is a top German law firm with more than 450 advisors across six national and four international offices, including London and New York. The firm covers the full depth and breadth of corporate and business law and supports clients with complex, cross-border matters.

To keep its edge, Noerr is investing in responsible AI that enhances the work of lawyers and support professionals without compromising strict client confidentiality and data protection requirements.

The Challenge: Modern AI for legal work, without compromise #

Before Open WebUI, Noerr ran its own internal interface for LLMs. As the pace of AI innovation increased, the firm needed:

• A cleaner, modern interface that lawyers would actually enjoy using
• Faster access to new capabilities and models
• Deep customization and integration options for legal workflows
• The option to stay with EU-only hosting and full control over data, encryption and logs

Off-the-shelf SaaS tools couldn’t meet Noerr’s standards. Feature rollout was too slow, integrations were limited, and strict internal data protection policies ruled out sending data to external vendors’ infrastructure.

The Solution: NoerrGPT in Noerr’s Azure environment #

Noerr chose Open WebUI because it could be deployed entirely inside the firm’s own Azure subscription while staying highly customizable and fast to iterate.

• Compute and orchestration: Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), with GPU node autoscaling for OCR
• Storage and database: Azure Database for PostgreSQL, encrypted at rest with customer-managed keys
• Networking: A private VNet, with LiteLLM as the central hub for LLM requests
• Secrets: Infisical
• CI/CD: Azure DevOps pipelines, with ArgoCD for deployments
• Monitoring: Sentry for error logging and Gatus for uptime monitoring
• Sandboxed terminals: Isolated terminals on AKS for agentic code execution
• Security controls: MFA, device compliance checks, role-based access by group, enforced EU data residency, moderation and guardrails, DLP policies, and audit exports to SIEM

Models, RAG and data protection #

Noerr runs Azure- and AWS-hosted models in EU regions only. Users can pick a model themselves or rely on agentic model selection, which chooses the most suitable model for the prompt’s goal.

RAG is set up specifically for legal use cases. It uses hybrid search with an Azure reranking model, and its sources are enriched with internal and with legal-specific content.

To protect highly confidential data, the built-in web search is turned off globally. In its place, a secure web search runs through Linkup and Noerr’s own sources.

Adoption and Enablement #

At the end of the 8-week development period, Noerr ran a focused two-week beta with 15 data and AI experts, then opened the platform to the entire firm. NoerrGPT is available to all legal advisors and to support functions, including HR, IT and legal assistants.

Enablement was intentionally lightweight and lawyer-friendly:

• written documentation tailored to internal use cases, and
• recorded practice sessions with live demos that users could replay on demand.

Results #

Noerr highlights three key results:

• Rapid adoption: More than 600 employees used NoerrGPT in its first week. That matched the previous platform’s monthly unique users, a sign of strong engagement and fit. Daily active usage stabilized at 60–70% of licensed seats within the first two weeks.
• High acceptance: Lawyers and staff gave positive feedback, despite the significant change from the previous interface.
• Stability and performance: All services under Noerr’s control are stable and performant, supporting day-to-day legal work at scale.

Top Use Cases #

• Agentic data retrieval from core applications and the trade register
• A pre-populated prompt library for extracting information from contracts and case files, and for drafting, analyzing and modifying clauses
• Q&A with specialized bots over internal policies and guidelines
• Deterministic data wrangling and plotting
• Fully agentic skill selection and execution

Why Noerr Chose Open WebUI #

• Open architecture: no vendor lock-in
• Speed: a rapid proof of concept and an 8-week implementation
• Full control: runs entirely in Noerr’s Azure environment, with BYOK encryption and full data ownership
• Flexibility: flexible enough to add custom features and connect to internal tooling

What’s Next #

With a secure and widely adopted AI workspace in place, Noerr plans to keep expanding use cases, deepening integrations and refining firm-specific workflows, while maintaining the high bar for data protection and compliance its clients expect.

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