Law firms are facing a pricing reckoning as clients increasingly expect AI-driven efficiency to show up in their bills. Thomson Reuters' 2026 Future of Professionals research found that 71 percent of in-house legal professionals expect their outside firms to change their commercial models as AI use increases, yet only 28 percent of law firms say they have changed their pricing structures in response.
The gap is already costing relationships. Thirty-two percent of in-house lawyers say they are reconsidering, or will reconsider within 12 months, relationships with firms that fail to demonstrate clear AI-enabled value. Clients have noticed that the machine works faster.
"The firms creating a true competitive advantage today are not the ones talking about AI. They're the ones operationalizing it," said Raghu Ramanathan, President of Legal Professionals at Thomson Reuters.
The economic question underneath
Jeff Bleich, general counsel of Anthropic, told the ABA White Collar Crime Institute that AI threatens the economic logic behind armies of lawyers performing repetitive work by the hour. "I don't think the billable hour is the solution," he said.
AI is eliminating the sort of tedious work from which lawyers and firms have historically been able to make considerable amounts of money. Clients still need lawyers, but they are less enthusiastic about paying premium rates for work a machine can perform in seconds.
What's left for the truly valuable lawyer is to move up the food chain. Strategy, negotiation, advocacy and risk assessment remain the things clients will pay a lawyer to do that AI's automation machinery can't easily reproduce.
The apprenticeship problem
There is, however, an awkward complication: how to produce top senior lawyers with great judgment if machines perform much of the work through which junior lawyers traditionally acquired it?
The Thomson Reuters report found that 78 percent of law firm professionals believe early-career lawyers depend upon experienced mentorship to develop skills that AI may now displace. The Law Society of England and Wales similarly reported this year that AI was the standout concern among junior lawyers attending one of its events.
Junior lawyers historically were paid to research cases, review documents, prepare first drafts and perform due diligence. None of that is glamour work, but it was how lawyers learned. The profession may have invented a technology capable of removing drudgery while accidentally removing part of its apprenticeship system with it.
For specific training on how to use these tools well, legal professionals can explore an AI for Legal Professionals resource that covers practical applications for law firm work.
What judgment actually means
A lawyer becomes valuable not because he or she can produce legal information, but because they know what to do with it. AI can produce a contract, but signing it may be a terrible idea. AI can find authorities, but it is the lawyer who remains responsible for determining whether they actually exist and matter. The lawyer stays accountable for the work product, regardless of who generated it.
Legal futurist Richard Susskind has spent decades arguing that technology would fundamentally alter legal services. His latest work pushes the question further still, asking what artificial general intelligence would mean for the legal market, the rule of law and access to justice.
Why this matters for legal professionals
This is the moment to reposition for value, not to defend old methods against new tools. The lawyers who prosper will not be those who can do the most legal work, but those whose judgment remains worth paying for after the machine has done the rest. That means developing the strategic, advisory and engagement skills that clients cannot get from software trained on past cases and routine documents. If your career trajectory depends on being the person who can produce the work product, that value is eroding; if it depends on being accountable for the outcome and the advice, that value is holding. Account for that shift in how you position yourself for the clients you want.
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