Your “AI Strategy” should not be an “AI” Strategy
There is hardly a law firm who has a real “AI strategy”.
There. We called out the elephant in the room.
Over the last three years, we have seen a parade of press releases from law firms announcing AI platform adoptions, successful rollouts, impressive user adoption rates, etc.. Harvey, Lexis+, CoPilot — pick your poison. Everyone is telling everyone they have succeeded because they have convinced their teams to log into these tools.
Except, adoption does not mean there was an “AI strategy”. What exactly is the benefit or the outcome of using these AI tools? Do press releases amount to much more than firms announcing they have successfully installed software?
Surely someone has asked the question: Why do we need AI in the first place?
The Wisdoms We Take for Granted
Let's pause on that question.
There are a few commonly accepted wisdoms that are taken as given:
AI is transformative.
AI is here to stay.
AI is changing everything.
Okay. But why?
Is it because AI introduces new efficiencies? Is it because AI introduces new capabilities? Is it because this AI is just “new”?
Yes, yes, and yes to all of those. But again — What does that mean?
This is where we have to keep asking questions. So what?
The Doors that AI Opens
When you keep asking "why" (maybe five times), you eventually arrive somewhere concrete. One place you might end up is this:
AI allows the practice of law to take a very different shape than what has been possible in the past.
In the past, you needed to throw man-hours at problems. You needed to be selective in setting materiality thresholds to screen out documents. You needed to prioritize the allocation of time because time was the massive constraint.
AI removes the conventional constraints in three fundamental ways:
First, AI allows people to systematically capture facsimiles of human expertise as workflows, so that certain things can be performed automatically — quite literally, “artificial” intelligence rather than human intelligence. In other words, AI can perform tasks with no human intervention.
Second, AI creates a thinking machine (or a machine that mimics thinking) to undertake some tasks in order to increase the capacity of human workers. They can now do five tasks in the span of time it would have taken to do one. Or, put another way, AI can reduce the time it takes for humans to perform a task.
Third, and perhaps most critically, AI changes how people can work and gives them alternative ways of completing tasks that previously would have been impossible, time-consuming, ineffective, or just weren't done. Now these tasks that weren't done can be done. It's not just about doing existing tasks differently — it's about extending the scope of what's covered in legal services. Tasks that were previously outside the service boundary can now be brought inside. In other words, AI enables performance of tasks that humans had not done.
Each constraint removed opens new doors.
Could, Would, and Should
Despite the new capabilities, “AI strategy” is not determined based on what COULD be done, but what SHOULD be done.
Rather than asking what you can do with AI, the better question is what you want to do with your firm or your practice. This requires looking into the future and asking “what does your legal practice look like in five years?” If I'm a boutique law firm, do I want to be the best in the industry in a specific field? If I'm a generalist, do I want to be able to do higher-paying work that delivers higher value? What is it that I want to achieve as a firm or as a practitioner?
The goal informs strategy. That strategy informs actions. And those actions may not have anything to do with AI.
AI adoption matters only if the adoption serves a strategic goal… and unless a firm has already decided what that strategic goal is, AI adoption is motion without progression. The wheels are spinning, but the rubber hasn’t hit the road.
We are not seeing a lot of evidence this introspection is happening at many law firms. Perhaps firm leaders have not had the time to reflect and define their goals in this shifting landscape. A lot more legal work will become commoditized, and competition is likely going to increase from all directions. Perhaps these thoughts are had, but actions are not taken.
Why Do We See Only Vanity Metrics?
One hurdle to why the press releases from law firms do not reveal a deeper strategic goal is perhaps law firm governance. Perhaps strategic decisions are being made by partners who are looking at their own practice, and not the greater whole. Each partner sees AI through the lens of their own book of business, their own practice area, their own client relationships. The corporate partner wants AI for contract review. The litigator wants it for discovery. The tax partner wants it for research. Everyone's optimizing for their own silo. And who is thinking about the firm as a competitive entity in a changing market? Who's asking what the firm needs to be in five years?
In theory, that's what firm leadership is for… but are the vocal partners overruling the voices of other strategic thinkers at the firm?
At some law firms, the IT, KM, and innovation folks are the "hired help". They're not rainmakers. They don't have books of business. They don't have equity. And in the partnership model, that means their voices carry less weight than the loudest partner who generates the most revenue.
The partner who feels strongly about AI (maybe they read an article, maybe a client asked about it, maybe they're genuinely excited about technology) starts pushing for adoption. Other partners hear their clients are asking about it, so they add their voices. The firm feels pressure to "do something about AI". And the strategy person in the back office — the one whose job is to ask "but what are we actually trying to achieve?" — gets overruled or ignored. Because partners don't want to hear about five-year strategic positioning. They want to know: "Will this help me serve my clients better right now?"
This isn't about individual partners being short-sighted. It's a structural problem with how law firms make decisions.
Law firms are not companies with unified leadership making strategic choices for the enterprise. They're partnerships where each partner is, essentially, running their own business under a shared brand.
Strategic decisions require consensus among people with divergent interests.
Perhaps the path of least resistance is to do what everyone can agree on: adopt the AI platform, roll it out broadly, measure adoption, announce success. No one can really argue against that. It's "doing something" without requiring anyone to make hard choices about what the firm should become.
The hard questions can wait — What work should we stop doing? Which markets should we exit? How should we redeploy talent? What's our actual competitive positioning?
Instead, AI becomes something that gets added on top of everything else. Everyone gets access to the tools and can use them however they see fit. This feels democratic. It feels like empowering attorneys.
Except, that is not strategy — it is the abdication of strategy.
The State of Adoption at the End of 2025
The consequences of the lack of real strategy are playing out right now:
Firms are implementing AI without any coherent view of competitive advantage. Every practice group does what makes sense for them, but no one's asking whether the firm as a whole is building something defensible.
Firms are unprepared for market reshaping. Individual partners are optimizing for their current client relationships, not anticipating how the competitive landscape is shifting. When alternative providers or in-house teams can deliver AI-powered services at a fraction of the cost, what's the firm's response? There isn't one, because no one's been thinking at that level.
Firms are missing the differentiation window. There's a brief moment right now where strategic choices about positioning could matter. But making those choices would require some partners to accept that their practice areas might become less central to the firm's future, or that the firm might exit certain work. That's a conversation most partnerships do not have.
The strategy function remains marginalized. The people who could help the firm think strategically remain "hired help" rather than true strategic partners. And so the cycle continues.
The Hard Questions for 2026
The focus on adoption and usage rates is a sign that our entire industry is implementing transformative technology without first asking the most basic strategic question: What are we trying to build?
You can't develop an “AI strategy” without first having a strategy. And you can't have a strategy without asking — and honestly answering — the hard questions about what you want to be, where you want to compete, and how you're going to win.
But most firms can't ask those questions because the governance structure makes it nearly impossible to act on the answers.
Most firms appear like they are drifting. They're doing things, announcing things, and measuring things… but what are the outcomes?
That's the absence I'm talking about.
We have to go back to the drawing board:
Start with the end. What do you want to be? Where do you want to compete? How will clients choose you over alternatives?
Work backwards. If that's Year 5, what does Year 3 look like? Year 2? Year 1? What capabilities do you need? What do you need to stop doing?
Then — and only then — ask what role AI plays for you. Not "should we adopt AI?" but "how does AI enable the specific strategy we've articulated?"
