May 19, 2025 – While recent reports show that law firm adoption of artificial intelligence tools is jumping, many firms haven’t reached the stage where they are measuring gains from their AI investments yet, according to current and former law firm leaders and consultants.
Law firm consultants said that many firms are still experimenting with AI tools and don’t know what they want to accomplish with the technology.
Darragh Fitzpatrick, partner and executive vice president at Tabush Group, an information technology services provider, recently told Law360 Pulse that law firms understand the potential of AI, but many haven’t yet figured out how to apply it to their business or firmwide.
“Firms are struggling to definitively understand how [AI embedded in legal tools] is going to be impacting core processes in their firm,” he said.
Brad Sidwell, a former BigLaw firm chief information officer and client technology strategist at professional services software company Intapp, noted that law firms are not going to see gains from their AI investments until they decide what they want to achieve with the technology.
He added that larger firms can have different AI goals across their offices and practice groups, so individual offices and practice groups should have conversations about what they want to achieve with AI.
“They’re doing all this soul-searching about what is it we’re trying to accomplish,” Sidwell said.
Law firms have many options when it comes to deciding what they want from AI tools. They can chase efficiency, productivity, cost savings, client satisfaction, revenue generation, client development and employee retention. However, some AI goals are harder to achieve than others.
For example, efficiency is an easier AI goal for law firms to accomplish than revenue generation, according to Sidwell.
Sidwell said that law firms already track how much time lawyers spend on assignments, so they can easily see if using AI tools are driving down the time spent on projects. He noted that revenue generation has more steps involved, making it a harder goal for law firms to achieve.
Andrew Dober, chief operations officer at law firm technology services provider K2 Services, said using AI tools can decrease a law firm’s revenue if attorneys get work done faster and bill less hours. He added that many law firms he works with are starting to use fixed fee arrangements to address the tension between time saved with AI tools and decreased hourly billing.
“If you have the same amount of revenue, but it takes you half the time to do it, now you’ve really increased your productivity,” Dober said.
Dober said that if firms stick with hourly billing while using AI, they need to have an “aggressive plan” for winning new clients, which is difficult to do when client relationships are built over years.
Erik Daly, member of Michigan-based law firm Miller Johnson Snell & Cummiskey’s corporate and mergers and acquisitions practice group and co-chair of the firm’s AI committee, said that his firm wants to use AI to decrease time spent on nonbillable work and increase client opportunities.
He said that a legal generative AI tool like Harvey, which his firm uses, can summarize U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings and reduce time spent preparing for an introductory call with a new client.
Daly added that by increasing efficiency in this way, the firm hopes in the long term to take advantage of untapped client opportunities.
“Sometimes we get so busy that we might get an opportunity, but we say it’s going to take too much time to even get the ball rolling on that,” he said.
Daly said one of the biggest challenges with determining AI gains is not knowing if an attorney is saving time on a matter using a tool or if the attorney is spending the same amount of time on a matter doing more high-value work.
“The hardest, most challenging thing is breaking down a particular time entry,” he said. “If the time entry is a prepared memo on fiduciary duty topics … what’s the breakdown within that between using an AI tool to help you research versus really drilling down on some thorny issues that maybe you wouldn’t have had time to get to or have even arrived at without maybe using an AI tool to spar a little bit on the question?”
Dober, who works with law firms of all sizes, recommends that firms have short-term, midterm and long-term goals for their AI tools.
He said a short-term goal and quick win for law firms could be getting everyone trained and using AI tools. A midrange goal for AI could be increased efficiency and productivity, and a long-term target could be moving to fixed fee arrangements as a firm, Dober said.
Dober added that one challenge for some law firms when it comes to adoption is their older attorneys, who are bringing in the most business, don’t want to adopt new technologies, while younger lawyers are asking for cutting-edge tools.
“The firms that are going to be the most successful in the coming decade are going to be the ones that have been able to invest now in making sure that young [attorneys have] the tools and the comfort that they need to be successful,” he said.
Laura Jakubowski, director of knowledge management and innovation at Chicago-based law firm Goldberg Kohn, said that her firm is planning to test a couple of AI tools in the next few months and might purchase one of those tools by the end of the year or early next year.
She added that she is also in the process of getting feedback from the firm’s attorneys about how they want to leverage generative AI tools.
So far, Jakubowski has heard attorneys are interested in generative AI tools for litigation and transactional document drafting, legal research and document review.
Jakubowski said measuring how much money is saved using AI tools is difficult. Instead, she evaluates success based on use and how happy employees are with the tool.
“If someone enjoys using a product, especially the associates, they’re probably more likely to stay. If they’re getting better work or more interesting work because some of the diligence is eliminated by a tool that they have, then they’re more likely to stay,” she said.
Sona Pancholy, president at global midsize law firm network Meritas, said that law firms have always struggled to determine their returns from technology investments, and it is no different with AI tools.
“The biggest challenge is that the understanding of what these tools can add is still evolving, whether or not it will completely replace work that they’re currently having to do, whether it will simply enhance that work and allow them to do it with more accuracy — that’s still being tested out a little bit,” she said.
Law firm leaders and consultants said one of the reasons law firms are using AI tools without knowing for certain what they want to accomplish or what gains they will achieve is so they don’t fall behind their peers.
“Maybe that’s the biggest thing that is driving a lot of firms right now is, we want to make sure that we aren’t at a disadvantage in negotiating or in turning things around quickly because there are competitors that are using something that we are not aware of,” Jakubowski said.
–Editing by Robert Rudinger.
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