The AI-ready firm starts with its people

For years, the conversation about artificial intelligence in law has been dominated by the technology itself. Which model is best? Which platform should a firm buy? Can an AI system review a contract, find a precedent, summarise a case or draft a first version of an agreement? The questions made sense when AI was still something lawyers were experimenting with. They are less useful now that the technology has begun to move into the ordinary machinery of legal work.

The more interesting question is what happens inside a firm once the technology is there.

That is proving to be considerably harder to answer. A law firm can purchase an AI platform in an afternoon. It can announce a partnership, create an internal task force and give hundreds of lawyers access to the same tools. None of this guarantees that the organisation will actually change. Recent research from Thomson Reuters points to precisely this problem: among professionals whose organisations have a named AI strategy, 35% say that day-to-day practice does not match it. The reasons are telling — tools are not in place, people have not been trained to work in the intended way, or there is no shared understanding of what the strategy actually means.

The implication is uncomfortable but important. The AI problem facing many law firms is no longer a problem of access to technology. It is a problem of organisational behaviour.

The technology is already here. The harder part is changing the way people work.

The legal market is moving quickly. Wolters Kluwer’s 2026 Future Ready Lawyer research found that 92% of respondents use at least one AI tool in their daily workflow, while 62% report saving between 6% and 20% of their working time. At the same time, Thomson Reuters reports that 77% of clients consider AI-enabled improvements in quality very important or essential, yet only 5% say they are receiving them from most or all of their legal service providers.

The pressure, in other words, is coming from both directions. Lawyers are already using AI, while clients are beginning to expect firms to demonstrate what that use actually means for the service they receive.

Yet technology does not change a workflow simply because it has been introduced into one.

A lawyer who spends three hours reviewing a document with AI instead of eight has not necessarily transformed the way the firm works. The firm has merely gained five hours. What happens to those hours is the strategic question. They might become lower fees, higher margins, more matters, more time for client relationships or more sophisticated legal analysis. They might also disappear into a general expectation that everyone should simply work faster.

That choice has little to do with software.

It has everything to do with management.

The firms that understand this are beginning to move beyond the language of adoption and towards something more difficult: redesigning the way work is organised around the capabilities that technology makes possible. That means changing processes, incentives, pricing models, supervision and, eventually, the definition of what good legal work looks like.

It also means accepting that the people who use the technology are not merely its end users. They are part of the strategy.

What happens when the work that trained lawyers disappears?

There is a quieter problem beneath the productivity story.

For generations, young lawyers learned their profession by doing work that was repetitive, laborious and often invisible. They reviewed documents. They searched authorities. They compared versions of agreements. They prepared first drafts. They spent long hours checking details that senior lawyers had already learned to recognise almost instinctively.

Much of that work was not intellectually glamorous. But it was how professional judgment was built.

AI is now beginning to absorb some of it.

That creates an unusual paradox. Technology may accelerate the development of legal work while making the traditional development of lawyers more difficult. Thomson Reuters found that 48% of legal professionals are concerned about AI’s effect on the development of independent judgment, while legal professionals expect the path to trusted judgment to become longer.

The question is not whether firms should preserve inefficient tasks for the sake of tradition. They should not. The question is whether they have thought seriously about what replaces them.

A junior lawyer who no longer spends hours on routine document review needs another way to learn how documents work. A trainee who can produce a sophisticated first draft in minutes still needs to understand why the draft is good, where it is weak and what the client actually needs. A young associate who can ask an AI system to identify the relevant authorities still needs to develop the instinct to recognise when the answer is incomplete.

This is where the human side of AI becomes more than a slogan.

The firms that automate tasks without redesigning professional development may discover that they have made today’s lawyers more productive while quietly making tomorrow’s lawyers less experienced.

Some firms are already experimenting with different approaches. Vorys, for example, has worked with Stanford Law School’s liftlab to create AI personas based on the thinking styles of its partners, using them partly as tools for junior lawyer training. Elsewhere, lawyers are moving into new roles as legal engineers, combining legal expertise with the development and refinement of AI systems.

These experiments point towards a broader change. The question for the next generation of lawyers may not be how to compete with machines at producing legal work, but how to become exceptionally good at the parts of legal work that machines cannot responsibly own.

That is a different model of professional development.

And it will require different leadership.

The firms that learn fastest will have the advantage

There is a tendency to describe AI competition between law firms as a race to acquire better technology. That is only partly true.

The technology itself is becoming increasingly accessible. Standardised AI tools are spreading rapidly, while leading firms are investing in increasingly specialised systems of their own. The Financial Times recently reported that some large firms are building bespoke AI capabilities in an effort to differentiate themselves, while the wider legal technology market continues to expand.

But access to technology does not necessarily create an enduring advantage.

The more difficult advantage is the ability to learn how to use it better than competitors.

That requires a culture in which lawyers can experiment without treating every experiment as a threat, where failures are analysed rather than hidden, and where successful practices can move quickly from one team to another. It requires partners who are sufficiently curious to understand the technology rather than delegating the subject entirely to IT. It requires lawyers who are willing to question workflows that have existed for years simply because nobody had previously had a reason to question them.

Most of all, it requires a firm to be capable of learning collectively.

This may sound less impressive than a new AI platform, but it is likely to matter more over time. The technology landscape will continue to change. Today’s leading model will be replaced. New interfaces will appear. Existing functions will become standard features of ordinary legal software. Any strategy built around a particular product risks ageing quickly.

A culture of continuous learning is harder to obsolete.

This is also where leadership becomes decisive. AI creates winners and losers within organisations before it necessarily creates them between organisations. Some lawyers will adapt quickly; others will be cautious. Some practices will find immediate value in automation; others will discover that their work requires far greater human oversight. Some partners will see an opportunity to rethink pricing, while others will continue to measure performance through hours.

The firm has to bring these different realities into the same conversation.

Otherwise, AI adoption becomes fragmented: a collection of enthusiastic individuals, isolated pilots and informal experiments rather than an institutional capability.

That is particularly dangerous in law because the risks are not merely operational. Confidentiality, privilege, accuracy, professional responsibility and client trust remain the firm’s responsibility regardless of which technology produced the work. The American Bar Association’s 2026 review of legal AI adoption similarly points to a widening gap between individual use and firm-level governance, with security, ethics, privilege and trust among the central concerns.

An AI-ready firm therefore needs more than a policy telling lawyers what they cannot do. It needs an environment in which lawyers understand what responsible use looks like and have access to tools good enough that they have little incentive to work around the organisation.

That is a cultural task as much as a technical one.

AI readiness is becoming a question of professional culture

The most revealing change may be happening in the definition of expertise itself.

Law has traditionally placed enormous value on accumulated knowledge. The lawyer who knows the law, remembers the precedent and can find the answer quickly has always had an advantage. AI complicates that hierarchy because information is becoming easier to retrieve and legal text easier to produce.

What becomes scarce when information becomes abundant?

Judgment.

Context.

The ability to distinguish an important problem from an interesting one. The ability to understand what a client actually means when the instructions are incomplete. The confidence to challenge an answer that appears convincing. The experience to know when a technically correct solution is commercially wrong.

These qualities are difficult to automate because they are not simply outputs. They exist within relationships and responsibility.

A client does not ultimately need a machine to tell them what a contract says. They need someone prepared to explain what it means for their business and what they should do about it. A board does not need an AI system merely to list regulatory risks. It needs a lawyer capable of helping people decide which risks they are prepared to accept. The more easily technology can produce information, the more valuable the person who can turn information into judgment may become.

This is why the AI-ready firm may look surprisingly human.

It will not necessarily have the most impressive technology stack. It may not even have built its own models. What it will have is a workforce that knows how to use technology without surrendering judgment to it; leaders who understand that transformation requires changes in incentives and structures; and a culture that treats learning as part of professional life rather than as an occasional training exercise.

The firm’s real AI strategy will therefore be visible in places where nobody would normally look for an AI strategy: in how associates are trained, how partners discuss performance, how teams share knowledge, how clients are billed, how mistakes are reviewed and how people are rewarded for improving the way work gets done.

That is the less glamorous side of transformation.

It is also probably the decisive one.

The legal profession has spent considerable energy asking what artificial intelligence will do to lawyers. The more useful question may be what lawyers will do with the possibilities AI creates — and whether their firms are organised well enough to make those possibilities meaningful.

Because the technology is already moving faster than most organisations.

The firms that succeed will not necessarily be those that move fastest after it.

They will be those that learn fastest with it.

And that is why the AI-ready firm starts with its people.

Image: Gonzalo Álvarez Balcazar