Hear from Parker Poe leaders on what it takes for law firms to earn client trust in the AI era
Highlights
- Client expectations have shifted from questioning AI's permissibility to demanding measurable performance and value from outside counsel.
- Parker Poe scales AI adoption through peer-to-peer sharing, governance, and programs like its firmwide AI Impact Challenge.
- In-house counsel should evaluate law firms' AI use at the matter level, not through marketing claims or buzzwords.
We recently had the chance to talk with Chief Information Officer Skip Lohmeyer and Partner and Public Finance Attorney Carlos Manzano from Parker Poe about the rapidly evolving conversation about AI between in-house teams and outside counsel, and what that means for how firms operate and how clients select the right teams to hire.
Jump to ↓
How AI is reshaping client expectations for outside counsel
Turning client expectations into firm operations
Scaling AI usage to meet client expectations
Building client trust through honest AI conversations
How AI will differentiate outside counsel
Assessing meaningful AI integration
How AI is reshaping client expectations for outside counsel
How is AI changing what clients expect from outside counsel today compared to even two or three years ago?
Carlos Manzano: Two or three years ago, clients were mostly asking whether AI use was permissible. The legal profession did not fully understand what AI was at that point, so clients were primarily concerned with whether the firm had thought through the risks, whether their data and confidentiality were protected, and whether the technology was mature enough to trust.
In 2026, that conversation has fundamentally shifted. Today, in-house legal teams are leveraging AI themselves to compress timelines, reduce routine work, and handle high volumes. Clients are benchmarking firms against their own operations and asking not whether their law firm uses AI, but what value outside counsel can actually deliver that their own capable teams cannot. The expectation has moved from permission to performance, and the firms that have not kept pace are starting to feel it.
What makes this shift particularly meaningful is the gap it has started to expose. The capabilities of generative AI tools have raised the floor for everyone providing legal services. The tools that felt like differentiators eighteen months ago are rapidly becoming baseline expectations. The more important competitive shift, though, is how AI empowers lawyers to raise the ceiling. Law firms that properly leverage AI solutions such as CoCounsel Legal with Westlaw Advantage can now deliver higher quality legal work faster than ever. AI-enabled lawyers can conduct more thorough legal research, sharpen contract and document review, and strengthen deposition and trial prep by surfacing inconsistencies and gaps across testimony and exhibits. Tasks that once consumed significant attorney time can now be executed with a speed and consistency that clients rightly expect from any competent firm.
When AI handles the lower-order work, it frees our lawyers to bring more judgment, more strategy, and more genuine engagement to the questions that actually define client outcomes. That means clients get both work that is higher quality and delivered faster, and counsel that is more focused and more valuable where it counts most.
Partner and Public Finance Attorney, Parker Poe
Skip Lohmeyer: Increasingly, clients view AI through the lens of risk management, operational efficiency, and business value. We see that reflected in conversations with clients, in RFPs, and in outside counsel guidelines.
Many clients are establishing expectations around confidentiality, data security, transparency, and attorney accountability when AI is used. At the same time, a growing number are asking different questions: where is AI improving efficiency and responsiveness, why would a law firm not use it responsibly, and how is it reducing legal costs?
What has not changed is accountability. Clients hire lawyers for judgment, experience, and trusted counsel. AI can help us work more efficiently, but it does not replace legal analysis or professional responsibility. We remain accountable for every work product we deliver and every recommendation we make.
Chief Information Officer, Parker Poe
Turning client expectations into firm operations
How does Parker Poe translate those shifting client expectations into concrete decisions about how the firm operates?
Skip: Our approach begins with a simple principle: technology should ultimately serve the client and result in better outcomes from their perspective.
We evaluate AI through three lenses: client value, risk management, and practical implementation. If a tool can help us deliver work more efficiently, provide deeper insight, or improve responsiveness while maintaining appropriate safeguards, we explore how to incorporate it into our workflows.
At the same time, we recognize that clients have different expectations and risk tolerances. Some clients are encouraging broader AI adoption. Others prefer tighter controls. We have built our governance and operational processes to support both.
What differentiates our approach is that we are focused on meaningful integration into our client service model. We are not pursuing AI because it is new. We are applying it where it can improve outcomes for clients while preserving the quality, judgment, and accountability they expect from their lawyers.
Scaling AI usage to meet client expectations
Many firms talk about AI adoption, but fewer talk about usage. Why is adoption at scale so critical to meeting modern client expectations?
Skip: Technology creates value when people use it optimally, meaning effectively and consistently applicable to their specific role within the firm and their clients’ specific goals.
An organization may purchase excellent AI tools, but clients benefit when lawyers and professional staff understand where those tools fit into their daily work and how to use them responsibly. Real transformation happens when adoption moves beyond a handful of early enthusiasts and becomes part of how the organization operates.
We want our professionals to understand not only how to use AI, but when to use it, when not to use it, and how to validate results appropriately.
The goal is not to apply AI everywhere. The goal is to identify the areas where it can improve efficiency, consistency, and insight while maintaining the quality standards our clients expect.
Chief Information Officer, Parker Poe
At Parker Poe, we focus heavily on education, governance, and practical use cases. And, we have learned that peer-to-peer knowledge sharing drives adoption far more effectively than formal training. A lawyer is far more likely to change how they work when a colleague in their own practice shows them a concrete result than when a trainer sits them in a course for 30 minutes.
We built our AI Impact Challenge around exactly that principle. It was a firmwide program, open to every attorney and business professional, that invited people to submit practical AI use cases that deliver measurable value and can be replicated by others. The strongest submissions were recognized and, more importantly, shared across the firm so that one person’s win becomes everyone’s capability.
Building client trust through honest AI conversations
How do you talk to clients about AI in a way that builds trust without overpromising or turning it into a marketing exercise?
Carlos: Clients have heard a lot of AI hype from a lot of people by now. They have watched announcements that looked more like positioning than practice, and they have heard enough “we are at the forefront of AI adoption” language to recognize it as marketing. Many realize that the legal industry’s AI adoption numbers often look more impressive than they actually are—attorneys typing a prompt into a tool isn’t true adoption. So when a lawyer walks into the room and starts talking about AI, the client’s radar is already calibrated.
You cannot talk your way past that skepticism if your actual AI use is shallow or inconsistent. Real governance questions only get worked through when a firm has genuinely integrated AI into how they work, not as a pilot program or a marketing story, but as part of how work actually gets done. Firms that have genuinely embedded AI into their practice workflows are able to answer questions at the matter level, and they can speak to them specifically. Firms that have not are often only able to talk about their AI policies, not specifically how it helps them deliver more for clients.
At Parker Poe, we have built our AI program around genuine integration rather than adoption metrics, and that is what allows us to have honest conversations with clients about both the value AI brings to our work and the safeguards we have put in place to keep it trustworthy. The specificity comes naturally, and clients can feel the difference.
Partner and Public Finance Attorney, Parker Poe
How AI will differentiate outside counsel
From a competitive standpoint, how do you see AI shaping what will differentiate outside counsel over the next several years?
Carlos: What will separate outside counsel over the next several years is not access to AI, but the combination of genuine integration and skilled lawyers who leverage it to work not just faster, but with a depth of analysis and thoroughness that was not practically achievable. That means deeper first-pass analysis, more thorough document review, stronger issue-spotting, faster iteration, and more proactive client guidance. The real competitive divide will be between firms genuinely redesigned around skilled lawyers using AI well, and firms that have merely added a software subscription while continuing to deliver legal services in the same way.
Firms that build genuine AI capability into how they actually practice will deliver a quality of work that sets them apart, and I think clients will notice sooner than the industry expects. As they experience what an AI-enabled legal team can actually deliver, their expectations will evolve. Clients working with firms still operating on the traditional legal services model will start to feel that gap.
AI also compresses some of the process advantages traditionally held by the largest firms, shifting competition toward agility, specialization, and client-focused service delivery. That is terrain where Parker Poe is well-positioned, especially because of our focus on the moments that matter to clients. Without the overhead of the largest national platforms, we are able to move quickly, build client-specific workflows, and deploy new capabilities at the matter level in ways that directly improve the client experience.
Assessing meaningful AI integration
If you were advising in-house counsel on how to evaluate law firms in an AI-enabled legal market, what should they be looking for beyond the buzzwords?
Carlos: I would encourage in-house counsel to push the conversation down to the matter level, because that is where the real distinction between serious AI integration and marketing language becomes visible. Every firm will tell you they use AI, but that answer no longer separates anyone.
The better questions are more specific: How would you use AI on a matter like this? What problem would it solve? Where in the workflow would it fit? Who reviews and validates the output? What guardrails govern the process? A firm with a genuine answer should be able to describe the tool, the workflow, the human-review protocol, and other guardrails in concrete terms. A firm without one redirects to a platform name or a firmwide initiative.
Make governance a non-negotiable part of the evaluation as well. In-house counsel should understand whether the firm’s approved tools can train on client data, what security or privacy commitments apply, and who is ultimately accountable for AI-assisted work product before it reaches the client.
One resource that can easily be overlooked in this evaluation is the people inside their own organizations who are already working with AI. The attorneys, legal operations professionals, and other team members in the organization who use these tools every day have a calibrated sense of what genuine integration looks like. They will recognize a real workflow answer when they hear one, and they will spot a vague answer or redirect just as quickly. Bringing those people into a firm evaluation, whether in a capability presentation, a working demonstration, or a direct conversation with the lawyers who would staff the matters, adds a layer of scrutiny that a traditional RFP process cannot replicate.
Beyond the technical questions, look for firms that are genuinely willing to co-design the relationship rather than treat outside counsel guidelines as a box-checking exercise. The most productive AI conversations between a lawyer and client are the ones where we are thinking together about where AI is appropriate, where it is not, and what outcomes the client cares about.
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