Attorneys are spending more time in AI tools. Can you prove the value they're creating for your firm?
Law firms have invested heavily in artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate research, drafting, and analysis, and many are seeing real productivity gains across legal workflows. What remains more difficult is understanding how those gains translate into business outcomes such as profitability and return on technology investment.
Jump to ↓
| Why AI productivity gains are hard to prove |
| Capture, classify, and measure AI-powered work |
| Improve profitability before problems escalate |
| Demonstrate the business impact of legal AI |
Why AI productivity gains are hard to prove
Law firms know that time is money, yet much of the work attorneys perform is still captured after the fact. Reconstructing timesheets from memory can lead to missed billable activity, incomplete narratives, and a less accurate picture of how work is performed. Laurel estimates that 10–30% of billable work never makes it to an invoice, because manual solutions and legacy tools weren’t built to capture the work completely.
Consider an attorney who spends the morning in CoCounsel Legal, researching the law, reviewing documents, and drafting, intermittently joining client calls, and responding to emails. Each activity creates value, but it’s easy to forget the work before logging hours.
For firm leaders, that visibility gap creates a harder problem. For example, how do you justify continued AI investment without the data to show what it’s delivering? Without that knowledge, AI remains a cost center rather than a competitive advantage.
Capture, classify, and measure AI-powered work
Thomson Reuters helps attorneys work more efficiently with trusted legal content and AI-powered tools. Laurel captures, classifies, and connects that work to financial outcomes through two complementary capabilities:
- Laurel Time™ automatically captures attorney activity across email, documents, calls, and the applications used throughout the workday, including CoCounsel Legal, Westlaw, Practical Law, and HighQ. That activity is automatically converted into compliant, matter-tagged time, with no manual entry needed.
- Laurel Signal™ measures the business impact of AI-powered legal work by analyzing usage in tools like CoCounsel Legal, Westlaw, and Practical Law. Firms get leverage ratios and true cost-of-delivery data instead of assumptions, with a live view of matter performance.
These capabilities give firms the evidence they need to demonstrate AI return on investment (ROI) for renewals, expansion decisions, and board reporting.
Improve profitability before problems escalate
Firms often miss profitability problems until a matter closes, when it’s too late to fix them. Scope changes, staffing issues, and budget overruns quietly erode margins long before they show up in a report, a risk that grows with fixed-fee and value-based work.
Picture a fixed-fee engagement where the scope slowly grows past what was originally priced. Extra research, drafting, and review hours pile up week after week, but nothing surfaces until the work wraps and the write-down is already locked in.
With Laurel Signal in place, that scope creep would have surfaced the moment the extra hours started piling up, not after the matter closed. This would have given the firm time to adjust staffing, renegotiate scope, or bring up the issue to the client.
Demonstrate the business impact of legal AI
Many firms can report who is using AI and how often, but few can say what those tools are generating in dollars. That answer comes from recovered revenue, reduced write-downs, and time returned to attorneys, not adoption numbers.
Early results from firms already connecting AI usage to business outcomes show what that looks like in practice:
- Up to 30 minutes of additional billable time recovered per fee earner each day, helping capture revenue that would otherwise go unbilled.
- Clear evidence of AI value through recovered revenue, reduced write-downs, and stronger utilization data.
- Earlier identification of scope creep, profitability issues, and staffing imbalances while matters are still active.
This is what accountability looks like for an AI investment: proof instead of a promise. Firms can see where AI is creating real value and use that insight to make better business decisions.
See how Thomson Reuters and Laurel help firms connect AI-powered legal work to revenue, profitability, and ROI. Connect with our team.
