Learn how legal professionals are turning AI strategy into real business value
Highlights
- Law firms with visible AI strategies experience twice the revenue growth from adoption.
- Successful AI implementation requires a people-first approach rather than technology-first strategies.
- A structured crawl-walk-run methodology ensures sustainable AI transformation for legal practices.
The gap between experimenting with AI and extracting real value from it has become the defining challenge for today’s law firms. Organizations with visible AI strategies are twice as likely to experience revenue growth as a result of AI adoption, and 3.5 times more likely to realize critical benefits.
During a recent Thomson Reuters webinar, a panel of legal professionals shared insights from our Future of Professionals Report and discussed how law firms are moving beyond AI experimentation to implementation. Successful firms deploy AI strategies that drive measurable results but achieving that success requires more than technology alone. Firms must put people first and align AI adoption with specific business objectives.
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Rethinking value beyond billable hours
Managing expectations at both ends
Rethinking value beyond billable hours
Jake Edwards, a litigation attorney at Krevlin and Horst, described how his firm uses AI throughout the litigation lifecycle. “You can use something like CoCounsel at the initial stage when working with a client to develop a timeline,” Edwards explained. “That timeline is instrumental in understanding how we’re going to view a case from a factual development side.”
What makes this approach powerful is the consistency it creates. Edwards noted that discovery requests use common phrases consistent with the complaint, making them less vague and confusing. Deposition outlines reference common themes from both documents, which makes summary judgment briefing easier. The entire case becomes more coherent from start to finish.
Kristina Bakardjiev, director of Legal Practice Innovation at Cozen O’Connor, emphasized that the value extends beyond time savings, especially in the context of business or transactional workflows. “Although we do not see efficiencies in the sense that it’s reducing billable hours, what we do see is an increase in the ability to expand capacity,” she said.
She offered a concrete example: if a diligence budget previously allowed sampling 75% of documents, firms can now analyze the full set with the same resources. “From a client’s perspective, they’re getting an increased value out of the same dollars that they’ve spent,” Bakardjiev explained. “But for us, we’re able to give faster, more thorough deliverables.”
The people-first approach
Ben Firth, director of Sales and Customer Success at Thomson Reuters, described meetings with firms where skepticism and anxiety about AI dominated the conversation. He challenged those reluctant adopters to examine the source of their resistance.
“If you actually learn how to use it in the right way, it’s going to make your job better and faster,” Firth explained. “I would really, really say to people, this technology is there to work with you, not for you.”
He recounted a client’s recent comment that illustrates this point: “I’m actually enjoying being a lawyer again, an attorney for the first time in years. I’m actually enjoying doing what I trained to do.” That sentiment captures what happens when attorneys can focus on high-level thinking and strategy rather than repetitive tasks.
Bakardjiev also reinforced this point by describing Cozen O’Connor’s approach. “Being people-centric has been central to our strategy instead of tech first,” she said. The firm identifies problems by asking lawyers directly: “What are your problems? Where would you like to see improvement?”
Their approach creates representative bodies in each practice group that funnel ideas to a task force, which reports to an innovation executive committee. It gives both clients and lawyers confidence that oversight exists while empowering attorneys to shape their own workflows.
Managing expectations at both ends
One unexpected challenge emerged during the discussion: firms must manage both skeptics and overenthusiastic AI adopters. Edwards noted that lawyers generally fall into two camps — those amazed by AI who become overconfident, and those who think it doesn’t live up to the hype because “it doesn’t write you a perfectly drafted motion with a two-sentence prompt.”
“You have to have two complementary but different strategies for those two groups of people,” Edwards said. The goal is encouraging use so skeptics see benefits while establishing guardrails, so enthusiastic users don’t create problems.
Bakardjiev emphasized the importance of transparency in this process. “We don’t sell [AI] as a perfect polished product that’s static,” she explained. “It is ever changing.” She also shared how benchmarking helped the firm’s accuracy rates improve from marginal success in 2022 to 85% by late 2025.
“Sharing those wins in real time and talking about the risks and where there is still room to grow honestly has been the way to overcome skepticism.”
The crawl-walk-run strategy
Valerie McConnell, vice president of Solutions Engineering at Thomson Reuters, outlined a structured approach to AI adoption. “Transformation takes time,” she said. “It’s not the type of technology that you can just drop on lawyers’ desks and expect ‘boom,’ they’re transformed.”
In the crawl phase, she explained that lawyers develop foundational understanding of what generative AI does and doesn’t do. The walk phase introduces practice area-specific training and simple use cases like document summarization. The run phase tackles more sophisticated applications aligned with business objectives — whether that’s time savings per matter, error rate reduction, or reducing write-offs.
“Here, I think firm leadership has an opportunity to really guide their lawyers and set the vision,” McConnell noted. The key is determining which use cases will further the firm’s overarching business objectives and steer adoption accordingly.
Thrive in an AI-driven world
The path to successful AI adoption requires patience, strategic thinking, and a willingness to invest in both technology and people. Firms that approach AI with a clear vision and realistic expectations will see returns that extend far beyond efficiency.
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On-demand webinar
Unlocking innovation in law: The future of professionals with strategic AI adoption
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