Strategic law firm innovation in the age of AI
December 4, 2025 . 6 minute read
Legal teams are moving from proofs of concept to measurable returns. Here's how firms are turning AI strategy into real business value - without losing the human edge.
Highlights
- Firms with visible AI strategies see 2x revenue growth from adoption.
- People-first beats tech-first. Adoption sticks when workflows and incentives align.
- Crawl-walk-run keeps transformation sustainable and auditable.
The gap between pilots and real outcomes
The difference between testing AI and getting paid for it is now the core challenge. Firms with a clear, visible AI strategy are twice as likely to see revenue growth and 3.5x more likely to realize critical benefits.
The throughline: put people first, aim at specific business objectives, and make change repeatable. Technology follows strategy, not the other way around.
Rethinking value beyond billable hours
Jake Edwards, litigation attorney at Krevolin & Horst, shared how his team applies AI across the litigation lifecycle. "You can use something like CoCounsel at the initial stage when working with a client to develop a timeline. That timeline is instrumental in understanding how we're going to view a case from a factual development side."
The payoff is consistency. Discovery requests echo the complaint's language. Deposition outlines track shared themes. Summary judgment briefing becomes cleaner. The case reads like one story instead of scattered parts.
On the transactional side, Kristina Bakardjiev, Director of Legal Practice Innovation at Cozen O'Connor, sees gains in capacity rather than fewer hours. If diligence budgets previously allowed sampling 75% of documents, teams can now review the full set with the same resources. Clients get more value for the same dollars. Lawyers deliver faster, more thorough work product.
People-first adoption that actually sticks
Ben Firth noted the common reaction in firm meetings: skepticism on one side, anxiety on the other. His take: learn the tool and it will make your job better and faster. The goal isn't replacement; it's removing repetitive work so lawyers can think at a higher level.
One client told him, "I'm actually enjoying being a lawyer again." That's what happens when attorneys spend more time on strategy and judgment instead of mind-numbing tasks.
Bakardjiev described Cozen O'Connor's model: start by asking lawyers where the pain is. Build representative groups in each practice area. Route ideas to a task force that reports to an innovation executive committee. The result is oversight with real practitioner input - confidence for clients, control for partners, and ownership for the lawyers doing the work.
Manage expectations at both ends
Edwards sees two camps: users who expect miracles from a two-sentence prompt, and skeptics who write off the entire category. You need two complementary plays - nudge the skeptics into simple wins, and set guardrails for the power users.
Transparency helps. Don't pitch AI as a finished product. Show the improvement curve. Bakardjiev shared how benchmarking moved accuracy from early struggles in 2022 to around 85% by late 2025. Sharing wins, risks, and what's still missing builds trust.
The crawl-walk-run plan
As Valerie McConnell put it, transformation takes time. You can't drop a tool on someone's desk and call it change.
- Crawl: Build foundational understanding - what gen AI does, where it fails, how to review outputs. Set policies and ethics guidance.
- Walk: Train by practice area. Start with low-risk use cases like document summarization, clause comparisons, and timeline building.
- Run: Tackle high-impact, measurable applications: minutes saved per matter, lower error rates, fewer write-offs, faster turnaround. Leadership sets the vision and prioritizes use cases tied to firm objectives.
Guardrails and KPIs that keep you out of trouble
- Policy: Clear acceptable-use rules, required human review, and client disclosure guidance. Map to ethics opinions and local rules.
- Quality: Benchmark sets by practice. Track accuracy, hallucination rate, and variance by matter type.
- Process: Prompt patterns, red-team tests, playbooks for due diligence, research, and drafting. Mandatory cite-check for any legal output.
- Governance: Approval for new use cases, audit trails, and periodic model evaluations.
- Metrics: Adoption rate, time saved per task, reduction in write-offs, client satisfaction, and risk events avoided.
Where to apply AI now (high signal, low friction)
- First-pass review: intake summaries, matter timelines, deposition prep outlines.
- Document work: clause extraction, issue tagging, playbook comparisons.
- Research support: case summaries with mandatory cite verification.
- Transactional diligence: full-set analysis instead of sampling when budgets are fixed.
Thrive with a clear vision
Patience, a people-first plan, and a tight link to business goals will outperform tool-first rollouts. The return shows up in consistency, capacity, and fewer write-offs - with happier lawyers and better client outcomes.
Trust your practice to CoCounsel Legal, the comprehensive AI solution that guides you through complex legal work from start to finish. Want to go deeper? Watch the on-demand webinar: Unlocking innovation in law - The future of professionals with strategic AI adoption.
Related resources: ABA Model Rule 1.1 (Comment 8: Technology Competence)
Complete AI Training: Courses by job
Your membership also unlocks:
