Mari-Claudia Jimenez, the former chair and president for the Americas of Sotheby's, has joined Withers as a partner and head of the firm's newly formed art and advisory practice in New York. Jimenez, who also served as the auction house's global head of business development, was its principal dealmaker and the driving force behind many of its major estate and single-owner collection sales. She left Sotheby's in February to establish her own legal and art advisory practice, which is now being folded into Withers.

The creation of a dedicated art and advisory practice in New York, built around one of the market's most connected transactional figures, signals the firm's ambition to combine legal practice with deal-level market intelligence.

In an interview with the Global Legal Post, Jimenez offered her assessment of artificial intelligence's role in the art world. She argued that AI will never displace the judgment of the connoisseur, but she sees real practical value in the technology: AI tools can identify an artist, pull comparable sales and assemble the background material an expert needs for an appraisal, compressing work that once took hours into seconds.

Her comments touch one of the art market's live debates. Appraisals, provenance research and cataloguing have become the front line for AI adoption in the trade, even as participants insist that ultimate questions of quality, attribution and value remain human ones. Jimenez's framing positions AI as an accelerant for expert work rather than a substitute for it.

Reflecting on her years at Sotheby's, she described the transformation of the auction industry across her tenure, a period in which the houses expanded aggressively into private sales, advisory, luxury goods and art finance. Her move from the commercial to the legal side of the market underlines how porous that boundary has become, with skills built in the auction room increasingly transferable to advisory roles.