Industry leaders reveal how genuine collaboration and strategic deployment are reshaping the attorney-client dynamic
Highlights
- Client expectations have shifted from prohibiting AI use to demanding measurable efficiency gains and transparent deployment.
- Successful AI adoption requires genuine collaboration between firms and clients, not performative checkbox exercises.
- Strategic implementation through targeted problem-solving drives organic adoption and uncovers unexpected value-driving use cases.
In legal practice today, three fundamental shifts are occurring:
- How lawyers and clients collaborate
- How value gets measured and delivered
- How technology manages risk
At the 2026 Strategic Knowledge & Innovation Legal Leaders’ Summit (SKILLS) Showcase, industry leaders explored this transformation where AI moves beyond simple automation to reshape the attorney-client relationship itself.
The conversation, moderated by Laura Safdie, Head of CoCounsel at Thomson Reuters, brought together Blake Rooney, Chief Information Officer at Husch Blackwell; Amy Monaghan, Senior Council Director at Ford Motor Company; and Emily Colbert, Head of Product, CoCounsel Litigation at Thomson Reuters.
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From prohibition to partnership
Creating collaborative AI deployment
Meeting users at their point of need
Building the future of legal collaboration
From prohibition to partnership
Client attitudes toward AI have shifted dramatically. Just three years ago, Blake Rooney recalls outside counsel guidelines frequently prohibited AI use. “There was a fair amount of pushback,” Rooney explained. “There were a lot of requests to not use AI in performing work for certain clients, and it was quite frequent.”
Today, that dynamic has completely reversed. “We’re now starting to take work in some cases from other firms,” Rooney said. “There’s a lot of ‘show me’ right now. They want to really see it happening, and they want some transparency on it.”
Amy Monaghan confirmed this expectation from the client side: “If you are leveraging AI tools and you are experiencing efficiencies, we want to see those gains reflected in the way that you are billing us.”
The end of “performative AI”
One of the session’s most powerful insights came from Monaghan’s critique of superficial AI adoption. She warned against firms that treat AI as a checked box on a marketing brochure. “Sometimes it seems more performative than real,” Monaghan remarked. “Like ‘check, we invited the client in to talk about how they want us to use AI’ and now we can go about and do things the way we always have done. That’s just not going to fly.”
Instead, clients expect genuine transformation backed by measurable results. “We want people who are going to put action behind words and listen to us and then back it up with their own deployment use and value-driven use of AI for us,” Monaghan emphasized.
Creating collaborative AI deployment
Monaghan described what makes client experiences truly exceptional when firms approach AI as collaborative partners. “I’ve had several A+ experiences with several of our firms,” she said. “The characteristics of why that is an A+ is we have attorneys and partners who are willing to have an open mind and open perspective. They’re willing to think differently about how they work with us and work on our matters.”
These exceptional partnerships involve firms that that are eager to share their extensive industry and client experience. “They help us test things and give us feedback of what’s working, why it’s not working, how we could potentially think about making these things better,” Monahan added.
Emily Colbert reinforced this point: “There’s a real opportunity for those law firms that show up as not just collaborators, but innovation partners and leaders.”
Meeting users at their point of need
Successful AI implementation isn’t about giving every attorney every tool and hoping for the best. It requires a strategic touch. At Husch Blackwell, Rooney uses “AI Solution Strategists” who “parachute in at the right moment” to determine if desktop AI tools can solve a specific client challenge.
This targeted approach drives organic adoption. When attorneys see AI solve an immediate, pressing problem, their skepticism vanishes. “We’ve got this level of comfort now where our attorneys come to us with challenges constantly,” Rooney said. This feedback loop allows the firm to uncover value-driving use cases they hadn’t even anticipated.
Monaghan explained how Ford uses a similar “bottom-up” strategy with “Bring Your Own Problem” (BYOP) workshops. These sessions focus on peer-to-peer learning, where legal professionals solve real-world issues in real-time.
On change management and adoption, we need to get to the users when they have a pressing problem. This isn’t just AI for the sake of AI, but how do teams actually get in there and solve those problems?
Head of CoCounsel, Thomson Reuters
AI as the ultimate coach
Beyond document review and research, AI is emerging as a powerful developmental tool. Monahan sees AI acting as a mentor or teacher, facilitating mock negotiations and depositions. However, she noted that the technology shouldn’t operate in a vacuum. “It requires firms and the partners of the firm to really take a leading role in helping to develop and deploy those tools and guide the younger attorneys in their learnings,” she said.
The technology is already reaching impressive levels of sophistication. Rooney pointed to tools that can simulate a deposition, allowing an attorney to practice against an overly aggressive opposing counsel or an evasive witness. This professional-grade capability allows lawyers to sharpen their skills in a safe, simulated environment before entering a high-stakes courtroom.
Building the future of legal collaboration
Despite common fears that AI will replace lawyers, the panelists shared an optimistic outlook. Monaghan predicts that the sheer volume of legal work will actually expand and evolve as more business problems will require legal oversight.
“I think that it’s going to require lawyers to be more context-oriented and more data-oriented because they’re going to need to ingest and absorb even more data,” she explained. “You can’t do that just with your brain alone. You’re going to need AI tools to do that.”
Colbert emphasized Thomson Reuters’ unique position to support this transformation. “Our vision is really to ensure that the technology is getting more and more powerful. We’re bringing the trust, the comfort — this is what you can rely on to get your legal work done.”
Trust in AI Alliance
Thomson Reuters is leading the way in responsible AI innovation with the launch of the Trust in AI Alliance, a first‑of‑its‑kind collaboration with industry leaders like Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and AWS
Learn more ↗Thomson Reuters is actively developing solutions to address the billing and value measurement challenges discussed throughout the session. “We have some in-house counsel expense software that we use today,” Colbert shared. “We’re looking at how might we integrate that into our products to help provide ROI data to help solve that problem. That’s something we’re excited about on our 2026 roadmap.”
The company’s vision extends beyond individual tools to comprehensive collaboration platforms. “We see CoCounsel becoming a true teammate and a teammate that works across law firms and in-house counsel,” Colbert said. This approach leverages Thomson Reuters’ decades of experience with client collaboration through products like HighQ, now being integrated into the AI-powered future of legal work.
The path forward
The AI transformation in law represents more than a technical upgrade — it’s a cultural shift toward transparency, partnership, and value. Firms that move past performative AI and embrace deep, collaborative innovation will redefine what it means to practice law in the 21st century.
Ready to start delivering measurable AI value? Watch the full SKILLS Showcase discussion on-demand to see how industry leaders are building the future of legal collaboration.
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