At ILTACON, we are looking at a room that has moved past the question of AI adoption and into the far harder questions of deployment, governance, and return. The veterans of this field have weathered many storms and have their playbooks honed to deal with newer tools and technologies. Even then, some would confess how AI is like no other technology before as it fundamentally changes the governance of the law firm itself.
There was a whole lot of learning and interesting ideas that emerged, but a few really stayed with me:
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Most firms now work with one Legal AI tool or another. Question of whether to use them is no longer treated as a variance.
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AI governance needs more attention, and firms realise that they need better measurement standards to analyse what is working. Debate on ROI of AI deployment is also accelerating, with no settled position yet.
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Firms are buying far more tech than they are successfully deploying. While many firms have solved the procurement, the deployment and adoption are the gaps that need to be addressed. Even across the firms, their adoption varies greatly, with some teams genuinely embracing these tools, and there are also those that actively resist. Firms making real progress treat pushback from the staff members as a signal.
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There is broad recognition that business case can only be built where the underlying proprietary data exists.
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AI conversations are moving out of the tech team into the business, as treating AI as a technical topic excludes the people who most need to shape it.
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Several firms also told me vendor dialogue has increased tenfold, which is a meaningful shift in where capability, and dependency, now sit.
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Most users are hardly touching more than a fraction of the features of the LegalAI tools, making the role of L&D teams critical across the firms. Fact remains that results of the tech decisions are taking materially longer to arrive than most firms budget for.