You made the investment in AI — now what?
AI is no longer an experiment in the legal profession. It’s a real investment with real expectations. From law firms and corporate legal teams to government legal departments and courts, organizations are investing in AI through licenses, training time, and internal resources. The expectation is that AI will transform the way legal work is done.
But ROI from AI is not automatic. Technology alone can’t deliver impact unless it’s trusted, embedded in workflows, and aligned with meaningful practice goals. Leaders face pressure from clients and internal stakeholders to show value, even as adoption remains uneven across the industry.
Recent research underscores both the opportunity and the challenge. According to the Future of Professionals Report 2025:
- Most law firm professionals (80%) expect AI to have a high or even transformative impact on the industry within five years.
- Nearly half (47%) of firms say they are already seeing benefits from AI adoption.
- Only 22% of firms have a visible AI strategy, and 30% admit they are moving too slowly.
- Broad adoption could save the U.S. legal industry an estimated $20 billion annually, the equivalent of 240 hours per user.
This gap between investment and impact is where the real story lies. Clients are moving quickly to adopt AI, particularly in corporate legal teams, and they expect their outside counsel to keep pace. Courts and government legal departments are also beginning to explore how AI can streamline case management, improve access to justice, and handle growing workloads. Legal organizations that fail to translate AI investments into value risk losing ground on efficiency, service delivery, and competitive positioning.
The data shows that AI ROI depends on people, not just tools. Lawyers, judges, and staff need confidence, training, and clear direction on how AI fits into their work. Without adoption, ROI will remain out of reach.
Strategy and leadership: Align AI with goals and drive change
AI investments only deliver results when they are tied to priorities and championed by leaders. Strategy sets direction by giving AI a defined role in business goals, while leadership ensures adoption follows. Together, they convert technology investments into measurable outcomes.
Strategy provides purpose
To create value, one should identify practice areas where AI can deliver immediate benefits. For example, research from the Future of Professionals Report 2025 highlights that firms linking AI to client-facing priorities are more likely to see positive outcomes. Areas such as litigation support, contract analysis, and knowledge management provide high-volume opportunities where efficiency gains are clear and measurable. Selecting these priorities prevents AI from being treated as an isolated experiment, disconnected from organizational goals.
Sequencing builds momentum
Leaders of legal teams may face resistance when adoption feels overwhelming. A structured rollout, beginning with low-risk pilots such as summarization or document review, creates early success stories. These pilots generate evidence for partners and clients, demonstrate effectiveness in familiar tasks, and build confidence for broader rollout into more complex workflows.
Leadership drives adoption
Cultural adoption depends on visible support from leaders and trusted colleagues. When partners model using AI in their own work or encourage experimentation, it reduces skepticism across teams and builds confidence in those tools. Champions who demonstrate real applications in practice groups also play a critical role, making adoption tangible and relevant. This leadership influence often determines whether tools remain underused or become central to workflows.
Ownership of AI strategy and adoption is often multidisciplinary. While CIOs or CTOs may lead technology and security, knowledge management, training, and practice, leaders play key roles in shaping adoption within legal workflows.
To be successful, AI strategies must be both clearly articulated and widely understood at all levels.
What separates teams that succeed with AI is not the technology itself, but the ability to connect it to strategy and encourage cultural change. A clear plan supported by leadership transforms AI from an isolated tool into an everyday asset that strengthens client service and operational performance.
Confidence and credibility: Build trust in the tools
For legal professionals, trust is the currency of adoption. Lawyers can’t put their name on work they don’t believe is accurate, ethical, or secure. Without trust, even the most advanced AI tools will sit unused.
Barriers to adoption
Research from the latest Future of Professionals Report shows that accuracy and financial concerns are the two biggest barriers to AI investment in law firms.
Beyond cost, lawyers and judges remain wary of hallucinations, bias, privilege risk, and data security. These concerns reflect the professional duty to protect clients, uphold justice, and safeguard sensitive information.
The role of governance
Guardrails are essential for addressing these risks. Our AI principles emphasize responsibility, transparency, and privacy, offering a framework to evaluate how tools are developed and deployed. Legal organizations can build confidence by adopting similar principles internally, ensuring legal teams understand how data is handled, how outputs can be validated, and how risks are managed.
Frameworks that matter
Trust is strengthened when adoption aligns with professional standards. Guidance such as the American Bar Association’s rules on competence and supervision, GDPR requirements on data privacy, and auditability practices for AI outputs provide concrete benchmarks. Together, these frameworks demonstrate that AI can be used responsibly without compromising legal or ethical obligations.
The impact on ROI
Legal teams that fail to address concerns about accuracy and ethics will see adoption stall, regardless of how much they invest. Conversely, leaders that prioritize security, explainability, and responsible use empower their teams to use AI confidently in their daily work. Adoption accelerates when professionals see safeguards are in place and that tools support, rather than undermine, their professional responsibilities.
For many law firms, legal teams, and government legal departments, buying purpose-built AI tools offers a clearer path to adoption and ROI than building custom solutions. Professionally developed tools are typically aligned with legal standards and come with built-in safeguards, making it easier to embed them into workflows and train users effectively. This alignment also allows enablement efforts to stay current with vendor updates and best practices.
When trust is earned, adoption follows. By embedding governance, emphasizing transparency, and reinforcing compliance, conditions are created where AI can be used with confidence.
Usability and enablement: Make AI part of everyday work
Training is the bridge between investment and impact. Legal professionals won’t adopt AI simply because it’s available. They need to know how to use it, when it makes sense to use it, and how to validate its outputs. Without this foundation, even well-planned initiatives risk losing momentum.
Training builds confidence
The AI Readiness for State Courts guide, developed by the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) and the State Justice Institute (SJI), emphasizes the importance of structured training to close the skills gap. Legal professionals need role-specific learning that matches their work, such as using AI for drafting, contract review, or legal research. Training should go beyond tool features to include guidance on when AI should and should not be used, and how to verify outputs. This preparation helps users feel in control of the technology rather than uncertain about its limits. Because AI capabilities evolve quickly, leaders should support continuous learning. Short, ongoing enablement, often tied to vendor releases, can keep teams up to date without overwhelming them.
Enablement embeds change
Once training is in place, leaders must focus on how to help integrate AI into their teams’ everyday workflows. The Future of Professionals report shows that larger law firms often invest heavily in AI but struggle with uneven adoption because tools remain separate from daily practice. Embedding AI prompts, templates, or coaching directly into legal workflows allows lawyers to experiment in real tasks with low risk. This “learning by doing” approach accelerates adoption and normalizes use. Equally important is reducing barriers to using the tools. Centralized provisioning, access to support, and clear guidance can lower friction, making it easier for professionals to start using AI confidently.
Refinement strengthens practice
Training and enablement get AI into the hands of legal professionals, but refinement ensures it sticks. Leaders should treat adoption as an ongoing process, monitoring how well tools fit into workflows and adjusting as needs evolve. If adoption slows or loses momentum, it’s important to understand why. Interviews with users who tried AI but stopped using it can uncover recurring issues, such as usability friction, poor workflow fit, or uncertainty about outcomes. This diagnostic step helps teams deliver targeted solutions, whether through technical fixes, workflow changes, or focused coaching.
When training is reinforced with enablement and ongoing improvements, adoption scales naturally. AI becomes less of a side project and more of a standard part of practice, leading to measurable efficiency gains and stronger ROI.
Measurement and optimization: Track what matters
AI adoption is not a one-time investment. To maximize returns, leaders must measure outcomes continuously and refine their approach based on what they learn. Tracking the right mix of metrics ensures leaders can show value to stakeholders and identify where adoption efforts need adjustment.
Measure both hard and soft ROI
Hard ROI includes time saved, lower costs, and increased throughput. For example, Thomson Reuters research estimates that broad AI adoption could save the U.S. legal industry $20 billion annually, equivalent to 240 hours per legal professional. Soft ROI, on the other hand, reflects harder-to-quantify benefits such as team satisfaction, client perception, and engagement. Both perspectives are critical. Measuring only cost savings overlooks the cultural factors, like adoption, satisfaction, and trust, that ultimately determine whether AI becomes part of everyday practice.
Engagement as a signal of success
Adoption is more than license counts. Tracking usage across groups shows whether AI is becoming part of everyday work or remaining confined to early adopters. Measuring engagement through metrics such as frequency of use, the percentage of team members experimenting with AI, or the spread of adoption across practice groups can provide early indicators of long-term ROI.
Continuous improvement
Measurement should not be a one-off exercise. Legal teams that treat reporting as an ongoing process are better positioned to scale pilots into enterprise-wide programs. By combining quantitative data — time saved, hours billed, or documents processed — with qualitative feedback — lawyer satisfaction, or client feedback — leaders can make informed decisions about if and where to expand AI use and how to adjust training and enablement.
Lessons from the courts
The AI Readiness for State Courts guide emphasizes piloting AI in limited, controlled environments before scaling. Courts are encouraged to measure the outcomes of each pilot carefully and use those insights to guide broader implementation. This structured approach ensures adoption decisions are based on evidence rather than assumptions, a lesson that legal organizations can adopt in their own AI programs.
The legal teams that succeed will be those that connect AI results back to business goals and use measurement as a tool for optimization, not just accountability. By tracking both outcomes and engagement, leaders can show clients and internal stakeholders that their AI investments are not only paying off but also evolving to meet future needs.
Make your next move count
AI is reshaping the legal profession, and success depends on how teams adopt and apply it. The strategies outlined in this guide provide a roadmap for maximizing the value of AI investments and ensuring they lead to meaningful results.
Firms, courts, and legal departments in both the government and private sector that approach AI with purpose, trust, and continuous improvement can achieve greater efficiency, strengthen client relationships, and build resilience for the future. The pace of change is accelerating, and clients expect their legal partners to keep up. Now is the time to move from experimentation to a measurable impact.
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