Key insights:

• • • A significant visibility gap persists between legal departments and the C鈥慡uite 鈥� Most general counsel believe their legal department contributes strategically, yet senior executives often fail to see or understand that value.

    • Strong internal relationship鈥慴uilding is critical (and often underdeveloped) 鈥� This capability enables legal teams to spot risks earlier, stay embedded in decision鈥憁aking, and make their work more visible across the business.

    • Closing the gap requires communicating legal鈥檚 value and increasing true AI fluency 鈥� For legal teams to be seen as proactive, strategic partners rather than task executors, communication and strong AI fluency are essential.

General counsel (GCs) have spent years doing more with less, tightening their legal spend, and aligning the law department鈥檚 priorities with the wider business. And yet, despite all of this effort, a striking visibility gap persists. While 86% of GCs believe their department is a significant contributor to overall organizational objectives, only 17% of the C-Suite agrees, according to the , from the 成人VR视频 Institute, which was based on more than 2,300 interviews with corporate general counsel. Meanwhile, 42% of C-Suite executives say the legal function contributes little or not at all to company performance.

The challenge for GCs is whether their staff have the skills and capabilities to make their work visible, relevant, and understood by the business at large. To address this perception gap in 2026, every GC needs to prioritize building richer internal relationships with business leads, moving from task-based to outcome-focused messaging, and improving the team鈥檚 collective AI fluency.

Empower teams to build internal relationships

Nearly half of all GCs surveyed for the report cited staffing and resource constraints as the top barrier to delivering additional value, a concern that has remained stubbornly consistent for years. Beyond headcount, the report underscores that the deeper challenge facing legal departments is relational.

Internal relationship-building is one of the most critical and underrated people skills in a legal department’s collective skill set. Indeed, 68% of GCs rate internal dialogue as their most valuable source of information about emerging risks. In fact, the most successful GCs use a deliberate combination of formal and informal methods to build connections with the internal business units that they serve.

You can learn more about how to assess your legal department鈥檚 strategic positioning with the听成人VR视频 Institute鈥檚 Value Alignment toolkit, here

Some run structured weekly face-to-face sessions with business departments, complete with schedules, plans, and frameworks. Others rely on walking the halls, open-door policies, and ad-hoc conversations that keep the corporate law department visible and accessible on a human level.

The report offers a five-dimensional framework to help GCs audit where, with whom, and how often legal is in dialogue with other parts of the business.

Use communication tactics that focus on business outcomes

Even when legal departments are doing excellent work, they often describe it in the wrong language. Many in-house lawyers categorize their contributions in task-based terms 鈥� such as 鈥淲e support M&A鈥� or 鈥淲e analyze contracts鈥� 鈥� rather than in value-creating terms.

Some in-house legal leaders have progressed to stakeholder-level framing, such as, 鈥淲e protect the company from competitive threats鈥� or 鈥淲e support new business opportunities.鈥� Still, neither of these levels truly communicates value to a C-Suite audience, the report shows.

To effectively align the law department’s priorities with business goals, in-house attorneys need to develop the skill of communicating through a business lens. For example, one GC states that the primary goal of the law department is to “find the fastest and most compliant way for the sales department to sell products.” This response reframes the legal function鈥檚 activities as much more business fluent and value-added.

Legal teams are not always good at touting their accomplishments, however, and this is a challenge when a lot of the work can be categorized as invisible. For example, when protecting the company is done right, threats are eliminated before they occur and no one notices. When efficiency is unlocked through process improvement, the C-Suite only sees the outcome if someone connects the dots explicitly. This is why surfacing invisible value is now a business imperative for corporate law departments.

Advancing from AI literacy to AI fluency

The most significant skills challenge facing legal departments in 2026 is how to best use AI strategically. Mentions of AI as a strategic priority among GCs have doubled in the past year, according to the report. In fact, almost half of all GCs now reference AI in their survey interviews. Yet the report draws a sharp distinction between being AI literate and being AI fluent, with most departments being the former but not the latter.

To close that gap, the report recommends a six-layer model covering learning, empowerment, ownership, accountability, usage, and expectations.

At its core, the model asks GCs to start with open encouragement and access to AI tools to build momentum, then shift toward more formal expectations around adoption to make AI use a daily habit.

You can download a full copy of the 成人VR视频 Institute鈥檚 here

Key takeaways:

• • • Efficiency is a means, not an end 鈥� Gains from AI only count when you can show what they enabled: better advice, stronger protection, smarter business support.

    • Narrow measurement invites cuts 鈥� Legal departments that measure AI value only through cost savings are telling C-Suites that legal costs less, thereby inviting budget and headcount reductions.

    • Measure across all four plates 鈥� A framework that captures effectiveness, risk, and enablement alongside efficiency is what shifts perception of the legal department from cost center to strategic asset.

Your legal department has invested in AI tools, adoption is growing, your team is saving time on routine work and, by most accounts, work operations are running faster. Then your CFO asks a simple question: What has AI delivered for the legal department?

If your answer centers on hours saved and cost reduced, you are not alone. However, you may be leaving your most important value story untold. And in a climate in which legal departments are under more scrutiny than ever to demonstrate the full return on their AI investment, that gap matters.

This is the fourth and final part of our series on the 鈥淔our Spinning Plates鈥� model, which frames the GC’s evolving responsibilities as:

1. 1. 1. delivering effective advice
      2. operating efficiently
      3. protecting the business, and
      4. enabling strategic ambitions.

This article focuses on the Efficient plate and specifically on the risk of letting it do too much of the talking.

The Efficient plate under pressure

For a GC, making the best use of what are often limited resources is a constant pressure. The Efficient plate sits alongside, not above, the other three plates and must be kept always spinning. Right now, however, for many in-house legal teams the Efficient plate is receiving disproportionate attention, and for understandable reasons.

AI adoption in corporate legal departments is accelerating quickly. According to the 成人VR视频 Institute’s AI in Professional Services Report 2026, nearly half (47%) of corporate legal respondents surveyed said their department has already integrated generative AI (GenAI) into their work 鈥� more than double the figure from the previous year. A further 18% reported that they鈥檙e already using agentic AI, with more than half expecting agentic AI to be central to their workflow within the next two years.

GCs are genuinely excited about what this makes possible. As one GC said in the survey that underpinned the AI in Professional Services Report: “It presents the promise of getting out of low-value work and into higher-value work that supports the business.鈥� Another described their vision of a legal department that is “boldly digital-first, relentlessly innovative, and tightly woven into business priorities.”

Clearly, the opportunity is real, but so is the risk of measuring it badly.

The measurement trap

Our 2026 research found that only one-quarter of legal departments are currently measuring the ROI of their AI tools. That alone is striking given the pace of adoption but the follow-up finding is where the real problem lies 鈥� of those departments that are measuring ROI, 80% are tracking it in terms of internal cost savings.

Reducing external spend, automating high-volume processes, and bringing more work in-house are all legitimate efficiency gains and worth reporting, of course. However, when cost reduction becomes the only story being told, two things can happen. Your C-Suite learns to associate your department’s value with how little it costs, a frame that is very difficult to escape once it鈥檚 established. And the wider value that efficiency enables in terms of sharper risk identification, faster business support, and higher-quality advice goes unmeasured and therefore unrecognized.

听If your metrics only capture time saved and cost reduced, and not what that freed-up capacity actually delivered, you are measuring the means and ignoring the end.

Think about what GCs themselves say they want from AI. As several GCs said in the survey, they鈥檙e hoping AI will provide them with “better output on more meaningful tasks,” “proactive, strategic insight,” and “getting out of low-value work.” These are not efficient outcomes, per se; rather, they are effectiveness, protection, and enablement outcomes, made possible by improved efficiency.

So, if your metrics only capture the input (time saved, cost reduced) and not what that freed-up capacity actually delivered, you are measuring the means and ignoring the end. This is the efficiency trap 鈥� measuring the plate so narrowly that it starts to work against you.

Reframing how you measure efficiency

Measuring efficiency well does not mean measuring it more. It means measuring it differently, and always in relation to the business you support. A few principles worth applying include:

Present spend in a business context 鈥� Legal spend as a percentage of company revenue tells a more credible story than a raw cost figure. It scales with the business and can be benchmarked meaningfully against peers.

Show what technology investment actually delivered 鈥� Time saved through automation is a useful starting point, but the stronger case is what the team did with that time. Tracking the shift from routine to strategic work over a period of time is a far more compelling ROI story.

Connect efficiency gains to business outcomes 鈥� An efficiency gain that enabled a faster product launch, prevented a compliance risk, or improved stakeholder satisfaction has a value that no cost metric will capture. Build those connections explicitly into how you report the value of the legal department to the C-Suite.

New resources to help

To support GCs in getting this right, the 成人VR视频 Institute has added two new resources to its Value Alignment Toolkit that directly address this measurement gap.

The Metrics Library brings together more than 100 metrics organized across all four spinning plates. It is a practical starting point for GCs to browse, select, and adapt to the specific goals of their departments, making it easier to build a measurement framework that reflects everything departments do, not just the part that appears in a budget line.

The AI Success Metrics guide addresses the AI measurement gap head-on with a best practice guide and a hands-on worksheet designed specifically for legal departments navigating AI adoption and asking: How do we actually know whether this is working? It looks beyond cost savings to capture the fuller picture of AI value including quality, capacity, strategic contribution, and risk.

Getting the balance right

In today鈥檚 environment, every GC needs to consider their answer when their C-Suite asks what the legal department delivers. Are your department鈥檚 metrics giving them the full answer or just the part that’s easiest to count?

Efficiency is not the enemy of strategic value. A department that runs well, uses its resources wisely, and embraces technology thoughtfully can in turn create the conditions for everything else the business needs from its legal function. However, that case only lands if your metrics measure across all four plates, not just one.

You can explore the new Metrics Library and AI Success Metrics guide, along with the full 成人VR视频 Institute鈥檚 Value Alignment toolkit听here

• • • AI is already reshaping the legal profession 鈥� AI听is already embedded in lawyers’ day-to-day legal work with a significant share of both law firm attorneys and in-house legal teams actively using GenAI tools, with many expecting it to become central to their work within the next five years.

    • AIFLP Advisory Board was formed to prepare lawyers for an AI-reshaped profession 鈥� TRI convened 21 respected leaders from legal education, private practice, the judiciary, and AI ethics and governance to help ensure lawyers and law students are prepared for a profession reshaped by AI.

    • Human judgment remains central in an AI enabled legal future听鈥� Becoming AI ready is not simply about learning to use new tools; the Advisory Board emphasizes strengthening irreplaceable human capabilities is critical.

In today鈥檚 tech-driven environment, AI is no longer a future concept for the legal profession 鈥� it鈥檚 already here, and it鈥檚 changing how lawyers work, learn, and serve clients. Recognizing just how fast the evolution is moving, the 成人VR视频 Institute (TRI) has launched the AI and the Future of Legal Practice (AIFLP) Advisory Board, bringing together a group of respected leaders from across the legal ecosystem to help guide what comes next.

The board includes 21 accomplished voices from legal education, private practice, the judiciary, and AI ethics and governance. Their shared goal is simple but ambitious: Help ensure that both today鈥檚 lawyers and tomorrow鈥檚 law students are prepared for a profession being reshaped by AI.

Why now?

Because the shift is already underway. According to TRI鈥檚 recent 2026 AI in Professional Services Report, 41% of law firm attorneys say their organizations are already using some form of generative AI (GenAI); and nearly half of those at corporate legal departments report that AI tools are being rolled out there too. Even more telling, most professionals said they expect GenAI to become central to their day鈥憈o鈥慸ay work within the next five years.

That pace of change raises big questions about competence, ethics, education, risk, and access to justice. And those questions don鈥檛 have easy answers.

What the Advisory Board will focus on

The AIFLP Advisory Board is designed to tackle those challenges head鈥憃n. Its work will center on four key areas that are already under pressure as AI adoption accelerates:

• • • Legal education and talent development
    • Ethics, professional competence, and accountability
    • Governance, risk management, and client counseling
    • Access to justice and modern service delivery

The Advisory Board鈥檚 early focus areas will look at how AI is actually changing legal practice today, what future鈥憆eady lawyers really need to know, and how legal education and real鈥憌orld practice can better align. The emphasis is not just on using AI tools, but on strengthening the human skills that matter most, such as sound judgment, critical thinking, and careful verification of AI鈥慻enerated outputs.

Shaping the future, not reacting to it

Citing the critical need for this Advisory Board鈥檚 creation, Mike Abbott, Head of the 成人VR视频 Institute, notes that the legal profession is at a crossroads, and it can either react to AI鈥慸riven disruption or take an active role in shaping how these technologies are used to support lawyers, courts, and the public.

鈥淏y assembling a board of distinguished leaders, our goal is to help practicing lawyers and the lawyers of the future navigate a rapidly evolving landscape,鈥� Abbott said. 鈥淓nsuring that legal education strengthens irreplaceable skills such as critical thinking, human judgment and effective communication helps make AI use safe and effective. The Board鈥檚 efforts will ultimately help shape a future-ready profession, leading to better outcomes for all.鈥�

Meet the AIFLP Advisory Board Members

By convening experienced leaders from across the profession, TRI hopes to help lawyers navigate this landscape with confidence. Advisory Board Members include:

• • • Michael Abbott, Head of the 成人VR视频 Institute
    • Soledad Atienza, Dean, IE Law School
    • The Honorable Jennifer D. Bailey, (Ret.), Partner, Bass Law
    • Benjamin Barros, Dean, Stetson University College of Law
    • Professor Sara J. Berman, University of Southern California, Gould School of Law
    • Megan Carpenter, Dean Emeritus, University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law
    • Ronald S. Flagg, President, Legal Services Corporation
    • Donna Haddad, AI Ethics and Governance expert, and founding member, IBM AI Ethics Board
    • Johanna Kalb, Dean and Professor of Law, University of San Francisco School of Law
    • The Honorable Nelly Khouzam, Florida Second District Court of Appeal
    • The Honorable William Koch, Dean, Nashville School of Law, and former Tennessee Supreme Court Justice
    • Sheldon Krantz, retired partner, DLA Piper, and a founder, DC Affordable Law Firm
    • Stefanie A. Lindquist, Dean, School of Law, Washington University in St. Louis
    • The Honorable Mark Martin, Founding Dean and Professor of Law, Kenneth F. Kahn School of Law at High Point University, and former Chief Justice, Supreme Court of North Carolina
    • Caitlin (Cat) Moon, Professor of the Practice and founding co-director, Vanderbilt AI Law Lab, Vanderbilt Law School
    • Hari Osofsky, Myra and James Bradwell Professor and former Dean, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law; Founding Director, Northwestern University Energy Innovation Lab; and Founding Director, Rule of Law Global Academic Partnership
    • Joanna Penn, Chief Transformation Officer, Husch Blackwell
    • The Honorable Morris Silberman, Florida Second District Court of Appeal
    • The Honorable Samuel A. Thumma, Arizona Court of Appeals, Division One
    • Mark Wasserman, Partner and CEO Emeritus, Eversheds Sutherland
    • Donna E. Young, Founding Dean, Lincoln Alexander School of Law, Toronto Metropolitan University

What鈥檚 next?

The Advisory Board held its first meeting in February and will meet quarterly going forward. As the work progresses, TRI plans to publish research findings, best practices, and practical recommendations for legal educators, law firms, and courts.

In a profession built on precedent and careful reasoning, the rise of AI presents both opportunity and responsibility. The AIFLP Advisory Board is an effort to make sure the legal community meets that moment thoughtfully and on its own terms.

You can learn more about the impact of advanced technology on the legal profession here

Key takeaways:

• • • Disconnect between legal departments and C-Suite perceptions 鈥� While many general counsel believe their departments are significant contributors to business success, most C-Suite executives do not share this view. Fully 86% of GCs say they believe their department is a significant contributor, but only 17% of C-Suite executives agree.

    • A need to find new ways to demonstrate value 鈥� Legal departments are under increasing pressure to do more with less, as nearly half of GCs surveyed cite staffing and resource constraints as their top barrier to delivering additional value. Despite these limitations, expectations from the C-Suite continue to rise.

    • AI adoption accelerates, business strategy comes next 鈥� Legal departments are rapidly embracing technology to improve efficiency, manage resources, and address cost pressures. Not surprisingly, the proportion of GCs calling AI a strategic imperative has doubled.

Over the past several years, general counsel and corporate law departments at large have transformed their operations. Many have become more efficient enterprises, leveraging technology, in particular AI, at an increased pace. GCs have adjusted their hiring practices to conform with the modern corporation, taking new ways of working into account. And they have embraced data-driven decision-making, evaluating outside counsel and their own operations alike with a wider suite of new metrics and KPIs.

But do you know who hasn鈥檛 yet realized the fruits of that labor? The corporate C-Suite.

Jump to 鈫�

2026 State of the Corporate Law Department Report

The , released today by the 成人VR视频 Institute, reveals a disconnect between how GCs and their corporate law departments view their own alignment to the wider business, and what C-Suite executives believe the legal department contributes. Within this gap, the message is clear: GCs not only need to align with their organizations鈥� overall business strategy, they need to learn how to prove that alignment to the rest of the company.

Indeed, when asked how they view legal鈥檚 contribution to the rest of the business, 86% of GCs surveyed said they viewed the legal function as a significant contributor. However, only 17% of other C-Suite executives said the same 鈥� and 42% said legal contributes little or not at all.

As the report explains, this disconnect lays the inherent groundwork for the tension facing many GCs today. While they are increasingly aiming to align to business standards, the rest of the organization is not recognizing those actions. Instead, many C-Suites are looking for even more out of today鈥檚 legal departments to prove their contributions to organizations鈥� business imperatives.

As in past years, many in-house legal departments are being tasked to do more with less. Nearly half of GCs cited staffing and resource constraints as the top barrier they face to delivering additional value. Indeed, many said they expected outside counsel spend in some key areas 鈥� such as regulatory work and mergers & acquisitions 鈥� to remain high. As of the fourth quarter of 2025, more than one-third (36%) of GCs said they expect to increase overall spend on outside counsel over the next year, while only 20% said they plan to decrease their spend.

Despite legal departments’ gains, their C-Suites are looking for them to take the next step, turning operational excellence into business success.

Not surprisingly, many GCs said they view technology as one of the primary ways they have to combat these resourcing and cost issues. In fact, the proportion of GCs mentioning technology as a strategic priority entering 2026 doubled over the year prior. Legal departments have begun to feel positive effects of AI in their own organizations, the report notes, such as increased efficiency or time feed up for strategic work.

Despite these gains, C-Suites are looking for are looking for their legal functions to take the next step, turning operational excellence into business success. This can take a number of different forms, such as explicitly tying advice to client business objectives, presenting legal spend in the context of the business by showing it as a percentage of revenue, or approaching risk management with the goal of aiding business imperatives. 鈥淲hen we have a risky legal subject, the company never prefers just to see the legal opinion,鈥� said one retail GC. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e also requesting you to drive them how to make a decision.鈥�

AI and technology should also be approached in this same way, the report argues. Although almost half of all corporate legal departments have some type of enterprise-wide GenAI tool, according to the survey, very few are collecting success metrics around AI鈥檚 implementation or linking its use to business revenue. Put a different way, many legal departments are focused on unlocking capacity, rather than deploying capacity in a business-centric way 鈥� much to the chagrin of their C-Suites.

Although legal departments have established a solid foundation upon which a business can stand, ultimately, C-Suites don鈥檛 want just a foundation. They want help building the entire house, the report shows, directly enabling the services that companies provide to customers. In that, GCs and legal departments have more work to do, not only tying strategy to overall business initiatives but actively communicating how the legal function鈥檚 work aids the company as a whole.

You can download

a full copy of the 成人VR视频 Institute’s “” here

Key insights:

• • • Client expectations around AI have shifted from curiosity to accountability 鈥� Law firms are now being asked not just whether they use GenAI, but to prove how it delivers measurable cost savings on specific matters 鈥� a question most firms still cannot answer with hard data.

    • A growing contradiction defines firm/client relationships 鈥� As clients simultaneously demand AI adoption, require granular billing transparency, and in some cases refuse to pay for work performed with AI, they鈥檙e creating a pricing and value paradox with no clear resolution for their law firms.

    • The ROI challenge around AI is fundamentally a relationship problem 鈥� Driven by a widening gap between what clients expect to save and what firms can demonstrate, a rift has developed between clients and firms, which is compounded by the fact that few firms have a coherent GenAI strategy in place.

NEW YORK 鈥� opened with a keynote conversation featuring Mindy Kaling, the Emmy-nominated writer, producer, and Tony Award-winning playwright, who reflected on a career built around one enduring fascination: messy relationships. She talked about growing up wanting to write something like Sex and the City, only to end up helping to chronicle the internal politics of a Scranton, Pennsylvania paper company in The Office. She talked about her love of watching people navigate breakups and power struggles and then finding the comedy in it all.

If she’s looking for new material, the three standing-room-only panels that followed could keep her busy for seasons.

Not surprisingly, the relationship between clients and their law firms has always been complicated 鈥� bound by mutual need but strained by competing incentives. Now, that tension is starting to reach a rolling boil as many law firms can鈥檛 seem to agree on exactly how the gains of their use of AI tools, especially generative AI (GenAI), are going to be split, or even if they鈥檙e going to be split at all.

AI is no longer optional or experimental 鈥� and many clients simply assume it’s already in use.

Across three 成人VR视频-sponsored sessions during this week鈥檚 Legalweek event, that tension surfaced again and again 鈥� not as a future concern, but as a present reality. Today, clients are arriving at the table more informed, more demanding, and more willing to use AI themselves. Firms are investing heavily in AI, but they still are struggling to quantify returns in terms their clients will accept. With the rates that law firms charge increasing 鈥� averaging more than 7% growth in 2025, and likely to stay on that pace in 2026 鈥� it sets up a collision with savings mandates that have yet to produce a shared framework for measurement. And underneath all of it, a fault line is building pressure 鈥� one that, as Ellen Hudock, GSK’s Chief of Staff Legal and Compliance, is not being resolved.

In 2026, GenAI has become the thing neither side can stop talking about, the thing both sides agree matters, and the thing that neither side can agree on how to handle.

This is not the story of an industry resisting change. Nearly everyone at Legalweek agreed that AI adoption is no longer optional. The harder questions, however, and the ones that echoed through every panel, every audience comment, and every hallway conversation is who benefits, how much, and who gets to decide.

Proving AI鈥檚 path to saving clients money

Three years ago, the client question was simple: Are you using AI, and would you use it on our matters? In 2026, that question has matured, and the new version is much harder to answer.

GSK鈥檚 Hudock described the shift bluntly during one panel. GSK is learning as much as it can from its outside law firms about how they’re deploying GenAI, she said, and are always looking to partner on new use cases. However, she noted that the conversation has moved well past curiosity. The pressure to deliver savings 鈥� internally and externally 鈥� is intense, and the questions have sharpened accordingly: What are you using? How are you using it? How does it generate savings?

Clearly, firms are hearing this message. Matthew Beekhuizen, Chief Pricing and Innovation Officer at Greenberg Traurig, noted that the pace of AI-driven change has accelerated sharply, particularly since October 2025. Clients who had previously said nothing about AI are now asking how it’s being used on their specific legal matters.

Indeed, AI is no longer optional or experimental 鈥� and many clients simply assume it’s already in use, said Mark Brennan, a partner at Hogan Lovells.

The trouble is that firms still can’t give clients the answer they most want to hear. When pressed on how much cost savings AI is actually achieving, the response from the firm side is often: We’re still gathering the data. Mitchell Kaplan, Managing Director of Zarwin Baum, acknowledged the industry is still in the anecdotal phase of measuring returns.

Sergey Polak, Director of Technology Innovation at Ropes & Gray, described the current state of ROI measurement as being based more on conventional wisdom rather than hard evidence. Hudock’s response to this was pointed: That’s exactly the situation in which clients want to partner. Supply the work, and let’s figure it out together.

The contradictions in the room

If the evolution in client expectations were the whole story, it would be manageable; however, the reality is messier than that, because clients are not speaking with one voice.

During another panel, Barclay Blair, Senior Managing Director of AI Innovation at DLA Piper, laid out the contradictions in sharp relief. Blair, who introduced himself as “the extremist on the panel,” is seeing clients who expect AI to be used and are asking how it will achieve specific savings targets. At the same time, many law firms are still receiving directives that feel lifted out of 2023, such as demands for warrants that models are unbiased, and declarations that firms cannot use AI without explicit permission. In 2026, both postures are arriving in the same inbox.

When pressed on how much cost savings AI is actually achieving, the response from the firm side is often: We’re still gathering the data.

The billing conversation captures this tension perfectly. Polak of Ropes & Gray noted that clients are beginning to ask for line-item transparency on invoices 鈥� was AI used on this task, and how much time or money did it save? Simultaneously, as Blair observed, other clients are issuing guidelines stating they won’t pay for certain services if performed by AI. This isn’t clients barring AI outright; rather, its clients demanding firms adopt AI, then using that very adoption as leverage to negotiate a decrease in costs. Not surprisingly, this becomes a self-reinforcing cycle with no obvious exit 鈥� at least, not for law firms.

Meanwhile, Zarwin Baum鈥檚 Kaplan raised a billing paradox that GenAI is making harder to ignore. As AI compresses work that once took hours into minutes, an itemized hourly bill increasingly tells a story that undersells the value delivered. His proposed answer: a return to the single line-item services rendered bill, which actually predated the billable hour. Kaplan then asked whether clients would actually accept it.

The advice to the law firms in the room from DLA Piper鈥檚 Blair was more blunt: Don’t wait for the client to set the terms. Lead the conversation about AI ROI and set the meeting. As Blair described, this is now the time to negotiate how value gets shared, while both sides are still figuring out the rules 鈥� not after one side has already written them.

The pressure hasn’t yet found a release valve

None of these tensions exist in isolation. They are symptoms of a structural mismatch between what clients need from the economics of legal AI and what firms are currently able to demonstrate 鈥� and the numbers suggest the legal industry is less prepared for this conversation than it thinks.

As 成人VR视频’ Steven Petrie pointed out, those law firms with a GenAI strategy are 3.9-times more likely to achieve ROI than those without one. Yet, only 22% of firms have such a strategy, Petrie said. That gap 鈥� between the firms that are thinking systematically about AI’s role in their business and those that aren’t 鈥� may turn out to matter less than the gap between what clients expect to save and what firms can show they’ve delivered.

The ROI question, in other words, is not just a measurement challenge, rather it鈥檚 a relationship challenge. And like all the best relationship drama, the tension doesn’t come from disagreement about whether the relationship matters. It comes from both sides wanting something slightly different from it 鈥� and neither being quite sure if both sides can get what they want.

If Mindy Kaling is still looking for complicated relationships to write about, she knows where to find them. This one鈥檚 going to need a few seasons to work itself out.

You can find more of here

Key takeaways:

• • • Become truly client-centered 鈥� Legal departments claim to be client-focused yet frequently make strategic decisions about effectiveness without systematically understanding stakeholder needs.

    • Decide where to automate 鈥� As AI transforms legal services delivery, decisions about where to automate versus where to deploy human judgment require evidence, not assumptions.

    • Build intelligence with continuous feedback 鈥� Systematic stakeholder intelligence reveals where speed matters more than depth, which services lack visibility, and where relationships can create differentiated value.

Today鈥檚 general counsels face a fundamental challenge as AI capabilities expand, that of determining where to deploy technology and where to deploy human judgment. Getting this formula right can create irreplaceable value for an organization. Yet many GCs may be making these critical decisions based on assumptions about what stakeholders need rather than evidence.

The paradox is that while corporate legal departments consistently say they want to be effective, client-focused, and responsive partners in service of the business, many are making strategic decisions about how to be that way without systematically measuring or understanding the stakeholder experience they’re trying to optimize. It’s like declaring customer satisfaction as your goal while never actually asking customers how satisfied they are. This blind spot doesn’t just undermine service quality; it undermines one of the four core accountabilities of every legal department which is that of being Effective.

This is the third part听of our series on the 鈥淔our Spinning Plates鈥� model, which frames the GCs鈥� evolving responsibilities as:

1. 1. 1. delivering effective advice
      2. operating efficiently
      3. protecting the business, and
      4. enabling strategic ambitions.

This article focuses on the听Effective听plate.

The information gap

Being Effective as a legal department means delivering high-quality, practical legal advice that is responsive to business needs, and this requires knowing what those needs are. Most legal departments rely on hallway conversations, occasional feedback during business reviews, and organic complaints or praise. While these interactions are valuable and should continue, what they lack is systematic intelligence that could be used to determine the best strategic decisions.

Ad hoc feedback is reactive, incomplete, and reflects the loudest voices rather than the broader reality. You hear from the very satisfied or the very unsatisfied, rarely from the middle majority of stakeholders whose experience shapes overall effectiveness.

As AI transforms legal delivery, this information gap becomes more costly. Without understanding which feedback touchpoints stakeholders prefer as human interactions and which they’d rather handle on their own, how can you decide which legal services to automate and where your team’s judgment and relationship-building are essential?

When legal departments systematically gather stakeholder feedback, they uncover patterns that challenge assumptions about what effectiveness means to the business.

Consider response time, for example. Many legal teams pride themselves on providing thorough, carefully crafted advice. However, stakeholder feedback often reveals that the speed of an initial response matters more than depth, at least for the first touchpoint. What lawyers see as diligence, stakeholders may experience as delay. This insight doesn’t mean the legal team should compromise quality; rather, true effectiveness comes from knowing when a quick acknowledgment is sufficient and when an issue demands thorough analysis right away.

Varied responses needed

Of course, different stakeholders have different expectations of responsiveness. For example, sales colleagues working under targets and time pressure need speed to drive momentum in contract negotiations. Understanding different stakeholder personas can help manage expectations and educate junior lawyers about the different business rhythms that the legal department must respond to.

Or, as another example, take service awareness. It’s common to discover that stakeholders simply don’t know the full extent of what the legal team can offer. Business leaders may not realize their legal team provides training, templates, or advisory services that could prevent issues before they escalate. The problem here isn’t service quality, it’s visibility 鈥� and that distinction matters enormously when deciding where to invest limited resources.

You can learn more about how the听成人VR视频 Institute鈥檚 Value Alignment toolkit听allows you to assess your legal department鈥檚 strategic positioning here

More importantly, these insights directly inform AI integration strategy for corporate law departments. Routine, high-volume work in which speed matters is a prime candidate for automation and self-service tools. Complex matters in which stakeholders specifically value a lawyer’s business understanding and strategic judgment is where to protect and focus human capacity.

Perhaps the most valuable output of fostering systematic feedback is when that feedback reveals where satisfaction varies across departments or stakeholder groups. A legal department might assume it delivers consistent service, only to discover that one business unit rates the department highly for responsiveness while another complains that it struggles to receive timely answers. These variations point to either inconsistent delivery or improperly communicated expectations. which are exactly the kinds of problems that process standardization, better intervention systems, or technology can address.

Without this type of intelligence, GCs risk automating services that should stay personalized, or maintaining high-touch approaches for work that stakeholders would happily handle themselves through self-service options.

The human value imperative

As AI handles more legal work, the question becomes: What can legal professionals do that technology cannot? The answer lies in the distinctly human elements of legal service such as judgment, knowledge of the business, relationship building, and strategic counsel.

The challenge for corporate law departments, however, is that without first knowing which touchpoints stakeholders value as human interactions, you can’t strategically deploy your team’s capabilities. Systematic stakeholder feedback allows evidence-based decisions on where the legal team’s relationship adds value and where speed or self-service could better serve stakeholder needs.

The question for every General Counsel then becomes: Are you making decisions on the department鈥檚 effectiveness based on systematic stakeholder intelligence, or operating with a blind spot that may be costing you more than you realize?

This then becomes critical intelligence for decision-making around resource allocation and restructuring, as well as for demonstrating the legal team’s value to the C-Suite in terms they can recognize. When a GC can articulate not just what their department does but how effectively it serves broader stakeholder needs, they are speaking the same language as the business they support.

This also allows a GC to shift from defending their department headcount based on workload volume to justifying resources based on stakeholder-defined value 鈥� and that’s a fundamentally stronger position.

Understanding the Spinning Plates

The Four Spinning Plates model 鈥� Effective, Efficient, Protect, and Enable 鈥� represents the complete picture of a legal department’s role and value within the organization. Yet research consistently shows a perception gap. For example, C-Suite executives over-emphasize the Effective plate while under-recognizing Protection and Enablement contributions.

This gap exists partly because legal departments lack metrics that capture effectiveness in business terms. They can report cost savings and matter volumes but struggle to demonstrate how well they’re actually serving stakeholder needs. Stakeholder feedback mechanisms bridge this gap by making effectiveness measurable and visible through the lens of those the department serves.

Indeed, it’s not about running surveys for the sake of feedback. It’s about grounding strategic decisions about AI integration, service design, and where to focus human talent, in evidence not assumptions. For those GCs navigating AI transformation specifically, this isn’t optional. Rather, it’s the difference between guessing where to automate and knowing where automation serves stakeholders.

Leading legal departments are already using stakeholder intelligence as their compass for AI transformation, leveraging that intelligence to best determine where to standardize, where to automate, and where human judgment remains irreplaceable.

The question for every General Counsel then becomes: Are you making decisions on the department鈥檚 effectiveness based on systematic stakeholder intelligence, or operating with a blind spot that may be costing you more than you realize?

You can learn more about the challenges that corporate GCs face every day

Key takeaways:

• • • Commercial awareness is a group goal 鈥� This must be a team capability and not just the GC’s responsibility.

    • Being “in the room” is critical 鈥� As standard practice, being present when decisions are made 鈥� like in the boardroom 鈥� helps position the legal function as a strategic partner rather than an emergency contact.

    • The keys to enabling the business 鈥� Strategic enablement means understanding business objectives and finding solutions to make them happen.

A Chief Legal Officer at a software company had a revealing interview question for the internal candidates who were seeking a senior role: “What’s your favorite product that we make, and what value does it give our customers?”

Many struggled. Some couldn’t answer on the spot. Others sounded like they were merely reciting the company website. Those who succeeded spoke easily and authentically about customer value, showing that they thought about the business regularly, not just when legal issues arose.

The message was clear: In order to enable the business, you need to know it as well as the business knows itself.

In this second part of our series on the “Four Spinning Plates” model, which frames the General Counsels鈥� evolving responsibilities as:

1. 1. 1. delivering effective advice
      2. operating efficiently
      3. protecting the business, and
      4. enabling strategic ambitions.

This article focuses on the Enable plate.

Building commercial muscle across the entire team

The above story about the CLO鈥檚 interviews reveals the uncomfortable truth that lawyers can be proficient in their legal skills yet disconnected from the business they serve. They know contract law but not what makes customers choose their company’s products or services. They understand regulatory compliance but not the competitive dynamics that are shaping strategic decisions within the company. And this gap doesn’t just limit individual careers; it prevents legal departments from becoming true strategic enablers.

Commercial awareness isn’t just the GC’s responsibility 鈥� every team member needs to understand the company’s products, its customers, strategic objectives, and values. Everyone should be able to articulate not just what the company does, but why it matters to customers and how it creates competitive advantage.

For many corporate legal departments, this cultural shift requires deliberate efforts to help lawyers understand the commercial context of their work, create opportunities for them to engage directly with business functions, and make commercial acumen a clear expectation for career advancement.

One GC shifted their team members from a stay in your lane mentality to one in which they saw themselves strategic advisors. The GC did this by redefining excellence as not just providing technically sound legal advice but also offering a point of view about how the business develops and grows. Now, lawyers are welcomed at every meeting, whether or not there’s a legal issue on the agenda. Legal team members strive to know the business as well as anyone and identify issues proactively

Being in the room as standard, not emergency contact

There’s a difference between being called in when there’s a crisis and being present as strategy develops. When the legal team only appears during emergencies, relationships remain transactional. However, when legal has a regular presence in strategic discussions, it builds trust as business partners can see how legal thinking sharpens strategy, identifies opportunities others may miss, and helps the organization make better-informed decisions. Then, engagement becomes organic as leaders naturally seek out legal input because the relationship already exists.

One GC described their department as focused on enhancing commercial performance, not just mitigating risk. This means developing a refined understanding of competing risks alongside opportunities and making strategic bets informed by business goals rather than by defaulting to the most conservative position.

Many GCs aspire to have a seat at the table but aren鈥檛 yet invited into strategic planning. However, there are ways to start building that level of involvement, including initiating cross functional meetings, asking to observe other department meetings, and leading technology and process improvements that showcase legal’s forward thinking.

Of course, better integration into the overall business creates its own challenges 鈥� as the in-house legal team becomes more approachable and visible, requests will increase and demand must be managed. As one GC put it, “the reward for good work is more work.” That鈥檚 why the most effective GCs must find the balance across all four plates by being accessible enough to be valuable and structured enough to be sustainable.

From Department of No to Department of How

Being a strategic enabler doesn’t mean saying Yes to everything. It means legal’s voice is sought out by business leaders and thus, carries weight. Rather than automatically saying No and explaining the risks of a business initiative, effective GCs ask Why? and then make an effort to understand objectives and find safer paths to yes that balance risk with ambition.

When regulatory changes created opportunities for an energy company to build pipeline infrastructure, the company鈥檚 GC ensured leadership understood all facets of the durability of those regulatory changes before committing billions of dollars. Regulatory shifts were likely to be contested, which meant that permits granted today could be overturned years later, leaving the company with unusable infrastructure and lost investment. By helping the business think through these scenarios, the legal department enabled an informed strategic decision, rather than a reactive one.

This mindset shows up in everyday legal work too. A GC at a fast-moving technology company described their focus as: “Helping evolve our contracts to keep up with the strategies or keep up with what the company is doing.” Rather than treating every new business model as requiring completely new contractual frameworks, the legal team modifies existing approaches to accommodate new risks without becoming “too intrusive on the business” or creating “weeks and weeks of negotiating.” This agility demonstrates how seemingly routine legal work 鈥� such as contract negotiation 鈥� has significant business impact when approached with a commercial lens.

Moving forward: Strategic enablement as ongoing practice

As complexity and change intensify, the GC’s role as strategic enabler is crucial. To jumpstart this process, GCs should assess their department in key areas, asking:

• • • How does senior leadership view legal? As a strategic partner, a necessary gatekeeper, or an emergency contact?
    • How integrated is your department into business operations? Are representatives from the in-house legal team present as strategy develops, or are they called in to review decisions already made?
    • How well is your team building commercial muscle? Can everyone on your team succinctly describe what your business does, who its customers are, where the company is headed, and what its values are?

GCs who can build commercial muscle across their teams, maintain consistent presence in business decisions, and approach challenges with a mindset of enabling solutions will become indispensable strategic leaders that help their organizations thrive.

You can learn more about how the 成人VR视频 Institute’s Value Alignment toolkit allows you to assess your legal department’s strategic positioning, here

Key insights:

• • • Cognitive offloading is a significant risk 鈥斕齌he correlation between increased AI usage and decreased critical thinking, known as cognitive offloading, poses a threat to effective legal practice, especially with the rise of autonomous agentic AI.

    • Agentic AI risks and opportunities 鈥� The next generation of agentic AI poses significant challenges to lawyers’ critical thinking skills, but it also offers opportunities for lawyers to enhance their analytical rigor and human insight.

    • Agentic AI can enhance critical thinking when properly leveraged 鈥斕齏hen designed by lawyers, for lawyers and used to augment human judgment in legal workflow tasks 鈥� such as discovery, contract analysis, and drafting 鈥� agentic AI can improve efficiency, deepen analysis, and allow legal professionals to focus on higher-value critical thinking tasks.

The legal profession is at a critical juncture as AI becomes increasingly sophisticated. Recent research has uncovered a troubling correlation between the use of AI and the decline in critical thinking abilities among legal professionals. This phenomenon, known as cognitive offloading, threatens the very foundation of effective legal practice.

Studies have shown a clear pattern linking AI use, cognitive offloading, and critical thinking. According to , there is a notable correlation between increased AI usage and diminished critical thinking performance among individuals. Moreover, as people offload more mental work to AI tools, their critical thinking scores tend to be lower. While correlation does not necessarily imply causation, this pattern is strong enough to warrant proactive measures to safeguard critical thinking skills.

The findings from the study have implications for lawyers. First, it is essential to design workflows that ensure attorneys retain ownership of problem framing, authority weighting, and strategic judgment. Human checkpoints should be inserted at key decisions, and transparent evidence trails should be maintained. For junior lawyers, it is crucial to preserve desirable difficulty reps 鈥� basically, the baseline skill-building experience 鈥� before they consult AI. By pairing these guardrails with outcome tracking, law firms can harness AI’s speed and scale while minimizing the risks associated with cognitive offloading.

Risks increase with agentic AI

The next wave of AI-powered legal tech involves agentic AI, which operates as autonomous agents. These agents can plan and execute complex workflows independently, make real-time decisions, and adapt strategies without constant human input. This autonomy intensifies cognitive offloading risks by enabling workflow automation beyond human oversight, strategic cognitive offloading, and the black box problem magnified. (Basically, these are situations in which a system鈥檚 internal workings are hidden, and users may know what goes in and what comes out, but not how听the system arrives at its decisions.)

To mitigate the risks associated with cognitive offloading, legal professionals can leverage agentic AI tools designed to enhance critical thinking.

The autonomous nature of agentic AI creates unprecedented professional responsibility challenges, including supervision standards, competence requirements, and explaining AI-developed strategies to clients. The legal profession faces significant challenges that could accelerate skills atrophy, such as new attorneys missing opportunities to develop foundational analytical skills, lawyers becoming dependent on AI, and AI handling strategic planning.

To mitigate the risks associated with cognitive offloading, legal professionals can leverage agentic AI tools designed to enhance critical thinking. For instance, AI-driven legal research and analysis platforms can make every step of the legal workflow more transparent, testable, and adversarially robust. These tools use custom-trained, agentic AI to produce transparent, step-by-step research notes and comprehensive reports that present arguments on both sides.

Illuminating examples of critical thinking skills

Agentic AI is transforming legal practice by enhancing critical thinking skills through various applications, and these innovative uses of AI not only improve efficiency but also augment human judgment. This in turn enables lawyers to focus on higher-value tasks that require critical thinking, creativity, and nuanced understanding. Several examples illustrate how agentic AI can enhance critical thinking in legal practice, such as:

• • • Discovery 鈥� Autonomous analysis engines have uncovered patterns that traditional keyword searches missed. In one commercial litigation case, an agent found subtle shifts in executive language precisely around the period of alleged misconduct. The agent was able to explain why those patterns mattered and then tied each inference to source documents.
    • Contract analysis 鈥� In M&A diligence, agentic AI examined hundreds of legacy agreements and flagged indemnification variants that created potential exposure issues. With about 94% accuracy, transparent AI reasoning supported a targeted remediation strategy that averted post-closing liability.
    • Drafting workflows 鈥� Expert-designed, multi-step workflows assemble relevant know-how, generate first drafts to specification, and require counterarguments and verification before stylistic polish is done. This approach has been shown to reduce review time by roughly 63% and legal know-how tasks by about 10%.

As we are learning, agentic AI strengthens core litigation work by preserving human judgment while expanding pattern detection, accelerating theory testing, and deepening client advocacy. By handling comprehensive case law analysis and factual pattern identification, agentic AI frees litigators to develop creative legal theories, anticipate opposing strategies, and craft nuanced arguments.

Thus, to better elevate critical thinking in legal work, it is essential to use AI that is designed by lawyers, for lawyers. Domain-specific AI legal assistants provide nuanced insights that inform sharper, more strategic decisions. And expert-guided analytical workflows support comprehensive analysis without encroaching on professional judgment, ensuring that attorneys can interrogate sources confidently and build arguments on solid ground.

By embracing agentic AI as a collaborative counterpart, legal professionals can heighten analytical rigor and human insight 鈥� the very qualities that make legal practice both powerful and purposeful. As opportunities expand, so does the potential for creating more positive impact for clients, engaging in complex problem-solving, and advancing access to justice for more people.

You can find out more about the impact of AI and other advanced technologies on the legal profession here

Key points:

• • • Reactive service is obsolete 鈥� The traditional model of waiting for client problems has reached its expiration date. Proactive, AI-powered monitoring creates entirely new categories of legal value.

    • Consolidation is coming 鈥� Within five years, the legal sector will bifurcate between firms embracing agentic AI transformation and those clinging to traditional models.

    • Early adopters set expectations 鈥� Firms that deploy AI agents as embedded legal monitoring systems will establish new client expectations that laggards will not be able to meet.

Welcome back to The AI Law Professor. Last month, I explored why asking the question “What if AGI?”听represents essential strategic planning for lawyers. This month, I’m examining a transformation already underway: How AI-powered legal risk management systems can prevent problems rather than just solve them, and what this shift means for the lawyer-client relationship.

When every business decision becomes an opportunity for real-time legal insight, the total addressable market for legal services grows exponentially 鈥� and AI, especially agentic AI, is going to make this happen at warp speed. Yet, this client-facing and proactive revolution isn’t about replacing lawyers with machines. It’s about reimagining the lawyer-client relationship entirely, moving lawyers from being reactive problem-solvers to embedded strategic partners who prevent issues before they arise.

The end of reactive lawyering

Picture a senior partner at a prestigious law firm, circa 1995, dictating a memo while associates conduct research, mostly by carefully perusing large legal tomes, in the library. Fast forward to today: that partner now types their own emails, the library has become digital databases, and junior associates spend more time with search algorithms than with senior mentors. Yet for all this change, the fundamental model has remained static. Lawyers still react to problems after they arise, bill by the hour, and treat technology as a tool rather than a collaborative method.

We’re standing at the threshold of something fundamentally different. The emergence of agentic AI isn’t merely about making existing processes faster or cheaper. It’s about transforming law firms from reactive advisors into proactive business partners, embedded in the real-time operations of their clients.

Current adoption of agentic AI follows a predictable trajectory. Firms deploy it for high-volume, low-risk tasks, such as document sorting, initial contract reviews, and basic due diligence. However, limiting agentic AI to these mundane tasks is like using a Ferrari to deliver pizza.

The fundamental model has remained static. Lawyers still react to problems after they arise, bill by the hour, and treat technology as a tool rather than a collaborative method.

The real power emerges when we reconceptualize the lawyer-client relationship entirely. Instead of waiting for the phone to ring with the next legal crisis, imagine law firms with AI agents continuously monitoring client operations, analyzing contracts in real-time, flagging potential issues before they metastasize into lawsuits.

This shift from reactive to proactive legal service delivery represents a classic disruption pattern. It doesn’t just improve existing services, rather it creates entirely new categories of value.

The proactive revolution

Here’s a prediction that might ruffle some feathers: Within five years, we’ll witness massive consolidation in the legal sector. However, it won’t follow traditional patterns of big law firms absorbing smaller ones. Instead, we’ll see a bifurcation between those firms that embrace agentic transformation and those that cling to traditional models.

The firms that thrive will look radically different from today’s partnerships. They’ll employ machine learning experts alongside lawyers, and they’ll offer managed services that embed AI agents directly into client operations 鈥� and they’ll charge for value delivered rather than time spent. Think of them less like law firms and more like legal technology companies that happen to employ lawyers.

Meanwhile, firms that treat AI as just another tool, that continue billing by the hour while using AI to work faster, will find themselves in a death spiral. They’ll have missed the tipping point when incremental change becomes revolutionary transformation.

Of course, the most exciting possibility isn’t incremental improvement but the creation of entirely new categories of legal value. Imagine a firm that doesn’t wait for contracts to go sour but monitors them continuously, alerting clients to changing circumstances that might trigger renegotiation. Picture legal departments that can simulate the regulatory implications of business decisions before they’re made, running thousands of scenarios through AI agents trained on relevant case law.

The most exciting possibility isn’t incremental improvement but the creation of entirely new categories of legal value.

This proactive model transforms lawyers from fire fighters into strategic partners. It expands the total addressable market for legal services by orders of magnitude. Every business decision becomes an opportunity for legal insight, and every operational change gets real-time analysis. A law firm could offer legal monitoring as a service, with AI agents acting as an always-on legal nervous system for clients.

Once firms start down this path, they’ll find it difficult to reverse course. Early adopters will set new client expectations that laggards simply cannot meet. The competitive advantages will compound over time as firms accumulate data, refine their models, and deepen client integration.

The choice is stark but clear

After decades of building AI tools for legal practice, I’ve learned to distinguish between hype cycles and genuine paradigm shifts. Agentic AI represents the latter. It’s not about doing the same things faster or cheaper; rather, it’s about fundamentally reconsidering what legal services could become.

The firms that will dominate the next era are already experimenting, learning fast, and profiting faster. They’re building products that automate commodity work while developing new service models that were impossible before AI. They’re treating technology not as a threat but as an amplifier of human expertise.

The choice facing today’s legal professionals is clear: Embrace the agentic AI transformation and help shape how AI can change your legal practice, or resist and risk becoming casualties of technological disruption. The medieval guild system of legal apprenticeship has ended 鈥� and the age of human-AI collaboration has begun.

Those who recognize this shift, invest in understanding and deploying agentic AI strategically, and reimagine their business models and service offerings won’t just survive this transformation, they鈥檒l thrive.

Indeed, they’ll thrive in ways that would seem like science fiction to that senior partner dictating memos in 1995.

The future of law isn’t about replacing lawyers with machines. It’s about lawyers and machines working together to deliver value that neither could achieve alone. And that future has already begun.

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Well, that brings us to the end of 2025! I wish you and yours a very happy holidays, and I鈥檓 excited to see what 2026 brings us. The future looks bright!

Key takeaways:

• • • GenAI streamlines law firm business functions 鈥� Law firms are leveraging generative AI not only for legal practice but also to transform core business operations like RFP management, client intake, marketing, and HR, resulting in significant time savings and efficiency gains.

    • Custom AI tools enhance security and adoption 鈥� Proprietary AI tools such as Ballard Spahr’s X-Ray RFP repository and Ask Ellis chatbot help firms provide needed insight into data while simultaneously addressing privacy concerns.

    • AI-driven content boosts client engagement 鈥� Baker Botts has bolstered client experience through the ability to spot and anticipate emerging client issues, while automated attorney bio generation optimized for online search helps improve firm visibility.

NEW YORK 鈥� The rise of generative AI (GenAI) has greatly impacted the daily lives of lawyers, in the process becoming a top-of-mind business priority for law firms of all sizes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of these GenAI conversations have focused on how the innovative technology can impact the practice of law and attorneys directly, through legal research, discovery, contract generation and analysis, and more.

However, the practice of law is far from the only place GenAI can have an outsized impact on a law firm. The workflows that underpin the business of law firms 鈥� business development, marketing, client intake, HR and talent, and more 鈥� could be transformed just as thoroughly as the practice of law. Since these areas impact attorneys indirectly, however, sometimes these GenAI applications are left relatively unexplored.

鈥淚t鈥檚 almost like in the business of law side, you need to demonstrate your value twice as much as on the practice of law side,鈥� says Andrew Hutchinson, chief revenue officer at legal technology company Nexl. 鈥淲hat can we do on the other side of the coin?鈥�

Hutchinson moderated a panel at the that showed some real-world applications of business of law AI from two law firms, Ballard Spahr and Baker Botts. The examples show that even a small amount of AI investment can have an outsized impact on the firm at large when applied to the firm鈥檚 real business pain points.

Use case 1: RFP repository

The request for proposal (RFP) process is widely recognized as one of the most tedious tasks facing firms. Especially in a large firm like Ballard Spahr, these RFPs can vary widely between clients, practice areas, and offices, leading to little standardization or ways to extract useful data from any single RFP.

Lisa Mayo Haynes, senior director of technology innovation at Ballard Spahr, realized that GenAI may be the perfect way to bring these disparate documents together. Using Microsoft cloud and GenAI, her team then built X-Ray 鈥� a large-scale document repository geared towards RFPs that can hold up to 2,000 documents in each instance, plus a chat feature that allows users to ask questions directly of the documents.

Haynes said her team built the tool first to solve wider problems, then set out to talk to practices to find individual use cases. 鈥淲hen we talked with our IP lawyers, they came up with this interesting problem,鈥� she explains. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e the smallest department at our firm, but they had the highest win rate on RFPs.鈥� The IP team wanted to maintain autonomy in RFPs rather than work through the firm鈥檚 Marketing team, but it still wanted access to the broader knowledge of the firm.

In response, Ballard Spahr built tagging into X-Ray, allowing for easy identification of relevant documents and re-use of newly generated documents across the firm. 鈥淣ow, once we had that use case, that spread to our other practice groups who said we want the same thing,鈥� Haynes says, adding that partners estimate they save about two hours per RFP because of this tagging.

Use case 2: AI assistant

More broadly, the Ballard Spahr team also wanted to expand its GenAI abilities to a wider audience. However, the privacy and security of an open public tool like ChatGPT was a non-starter for firm leadership. Thus, Haynes鈥� team set about building a new proprietary tool, Ask Ellis.

The Ask Ellis chatbot started as a common chat with drafting and analysis capabilities and has since grown to include more specific use cases including creating visuals from Excel, analyzing an image, text to speech, and deposition analysis. Ask Ellis is regularly used to craft emails, convert text from legalese to plain language, and answer surveys and awards submissions within a text limit. Today, Ask Ellis has 900 active users and growing.

鈥淲e try to give [users] those practical use cases, so they know how to use Ask Ellis in their daily life,鈥� Haynes explains. 鈥淲e tell people it鈥檚 not a legal research tool, but just for simple, every day, make-your-work better tasks 鈥� it鈥檚 really been huge.鈥�

Use case 3: Opportunity spotting

At Baker Botts, one of the main roles for the data science team is to help lawyers begin conversations with clients more quickly and with more authority. If the firm hired a new attorney, for example, the firm wants to prepare that attorney to 鈥渧ery quickly become well-versed in all the firm鈥檚 capabilities,鈥� says Lynne Kilgore, associate director in competitive intelligence, data science, and analytics at Baker Botts.

Previously, that preparation job consisted of 24 hours of research to gather documents and data; but once a new data scientist came on board, their first task was to use GenAI to cut that time by more than half. The result is a new tool 鈥� built within the Google system with Gemini 鈥� that not only provides background information on a client, but also uses a combination of publicly available information, financial data, and proprietary firm info to give a low, medium, or high score of a current or prospective client鈥檚 anticipated legal needs in a given practice area.

鈥淏usiness developers and lawyers can go in, run the search themselves, and in two minutes of querying they have a readout with a score,鈥� Kilgore says. This allows for more fruitful client conversations without the need for background info or to get up to speed.

Use case 4: Website bio generation

About one year ago, Kilgore says the firm鈥檚 COO ran into a problem. They were perusing the web, doing an online search for best lawyers in the Houston area, and Baker Botts popped up 鈥� along with information for attorneys that had retired from the firm more than five years ago.

The COO wanted the data science team to not only update the firm鈥檚 website, but also to do so in a way that would propel the firm鈥檚 visibility in online searches. Using a combination of secure and vetted AI tools, the data science team built a new tool that draws from lawyer time sheets, the knowledge management platform Foundation, and public websites to create a more comprehensive view of the work that a specific attorney actually does, which in turn allows for more up-to-date information on clients, cases and matters, and the attorney鈥檚 status within the firm.

The data science team established guardrails then asked the tool to optimize the resulting output. 鈥淲e went from really generic bios, to鈥� bios that are more likely to be picked up through answer engine optimization,鈥� Kilgore says. 鈥淣ow if somebody asks, 鈥榃ho鈥檚 the best energy private equity lawyer in Houston?鈥�, we want to be the one that pops up.鈥�

You can find out more about the challenges and opportunities that advanced tech brings to the legal industry here