The AI Strategy Potluck: Law Firms Showing Up Empty-Handed, Hungry, And Weirdly Proud Of It

Everyone’s talking about AI in legal — for better or worse — and lawyers are mostly using some mix of AI tools in some form or another occasionally. But how many firms out there have a strategy beyond, “I dunno, you all figure it out”? It seems the answer is “not many,” which is unfortunate because having a strategy is far more important than whether or not anyone’s using it.

The Thomson Reuters “Future of Professionals” report just dropped and one stat standing out among its insights is that organizations with a visible AI strategy are not only twice as likely to report growth, they’re also 3.5 times more likely to see actual, tangible benefits from AI adoption.

And yet, of a profession that fancies itself a bunch of 4D chess players, only 22 percent of organizations have such a plan. Come on! This isn’t like the nation’s Iran policy… you actually need to do some strategic planning for this one.

While headlines have focused on the gap between the 31 percent with no plans for adoption and everyone else, the more pressing concern might be the 43 percent just winging it. That 31 percent may be left behind while they fax their Word Perfect drafts to co-counsel, but they’ll be relatively harmless in their Faraday cage of sadness. The 43 percent are going to reap fewer of the benefits while taking on a whole lot of the risk. Sort of “malpractice slow motion.”

Or, if it’s not malpractice, it’s at least leaving money on the table. Thomson Reuters estimates AI will save professionals five hours a week — or nearly 240 hours per year — which they estimate as about $19,000 per professional annually. That scales up to about $32 billion in unlocked capacity across the industry. But that industry estimate assumes an hourly rate of less than a hundred (because it’s mixed to include the whole range of legal professionals). Assuming lawyers think their time is more valuable — and they definitely think that — and that there’s five hours a week worth of work that a junior associate can offload to AI, that’s like $150K in time they can be forced to toil on other projects. They can’t double bill time of course, but adopt some fixed fee projects to capture the value of saved time and that’s money waiting to be grabbed BY YOU.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks in legal tech is adoption. Many firms have savvy tech professionals who can go out and buy the right products, but they’re only valuable if lawyers know they exist. That’s where a good strategy would come in. The good news is that roughly 96 percent of respondents have a grasp that AI exists. The bad news is that most lawyers are finding out about AI by randomly hunting and pecking on their own:

To all of you learning about AI strategy by voluntarily coming to Above the Law right now… welcome! Please enjoy your stay. Learn about federal chewing gum caselaw while you’re here.

This is Underpants Gnome territory:

The question for law firms isn’t “Should we adopt AI?” That ship’s left the harbor, and it’s firing on your position. The question is how to harness the tech, leverage the firm’s years of intellectual capital, avoid pitfalls, protect client data, and turn all that free time into new revenue.

Thankfully for firms, most of your competitors are lagging behind too so there’s plenty of time to get ahead on this. Those that don’t, as the report concludes, “will find themselves floundering and ultimately failing to maintain a competitive advantage or deliver value to their businesses or clients.”

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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