Research repeatedly points to the adoption of AI in the legal sector as no longer being an optional extra, but a strategic priority. Today’s Family Lawyer editor Juliet Shaw takes a look at the latest reports and what they mean for law firm leaders.
Leadership responses to the rapid development of AI in the legal sector will determine whether firms succeed, according to the authors of a new report.
The Leadership Challenge of AI in Law warns that few firms have integrated AI use into strategy and governance despite its increasing prevalence in the legal sector.
Writing in the foreword of the report, Yasmin Lambert, managing director of RSGI, a global intelligence and advisory agency for the legal industry, warns AI and technology must become central to law firm strategy, with leadership decisions critical to business success.
“At RSGI, we have spent more than 20 years charting innovation in how law is practised and managed,” Lambert writes. “Since the launch of generative AI, we have seen more exciting and more disruptive changes than in the entire decade that came before.”
She adds: “Engaging your firm to embrace AI, setting the cultural conditions for sustained change, and building institutional agility and the creative energy to develop new solutions and ways of working will be what allows your firm to move ahead of competitors.”
Heading towards crisis
The report, which was produced by behavioural science company Positive Group in collaboration with researchers from Harvard Business School, RSGI and Hubel Labs, echoes the findings of a LexisNexis Legal & Professional report released earlier this year.
Both reports identified that the growing use of AI for legal research, reviewing documents and drafting arguments is affecting the development of essential skills in junior lawyers.
“We are heading toward a potential crisis of potential skills deficit in critical thinking and appraisal,” says Will Marien, director at The Positive Group. “If a junior lawyer hasn’t spent years digging through the ‘why’ behind a contract clause because a machine produced it in seconds, they lose the ability to spot the nuance where the real risk lives.”
He adds: “By removing the repetitive, routine work, we are inadvertently removing the training ground for work that involves judgement, appraisal and interrogation of sources.”
Last year, a panel at the Law Society Property Conference warned of the increasing use of shadow AI – third-party tools such as ChatGPT and other LLMs used by legal professionals without oversight or approval from firms.
Speaking during the panel discussion, Nisha Morjaria from Talbots Law explained: “You have to be very conscious anyone could take work home and put it through a public AI tool, compromising data privacy and risking hallucinations.”
Accelerated adoption
With the accelerated pace of adoption within the legal sector, the deliberate implementation of AI into existing workflows is not enough to combat risk, the Positive Group report warns.
“In practice, AI is often introduced into existing workflows without fundamentally redesigning how work is organised. Lawyers are expected to learn new tools, rethink workflows and respond to shifting client expectations while continuing to deliver on existing matters.
“In environments already defined by intense workload and billable-hour pressure, this creates sustained time pressure. Rather than simplifying work, AI often becomes an additional layer of complexity.
“Under these conditions, behavioural risks begin to emerge. When time is constrained, professionals are more likely to accept AI-generated outputs without fully interrogating them. At the same time, without deliberate redesign, AI reinforces existing patterns of work rather than transforming them.
“The result is not transformation, but accumulation: new tools layered onto old ways of working.”
The problem or the solution?
Some AI tools claim to offer the solutions to the problems the technology creates. Workflow platform Felix has been developed for legal, insurance and accounting sectors to address the risk of shadow AI and recently raised $1.7 million in pre-seed funding to scale the system across the specialist sectors.
“AI has made it easier to work faster as individuals, but it hasn’t solved how work gets done across a business,” Felix co-founder Tomas Scavnicky said.
“In professional services, you need consistency, accountability and control. Felix turns AI from something experimental into something you can actually run your operations on. In law, that matters. You’re not relying on black box outputs, and your clients get both the service and the confidence they expect.”
Matej Vetrak, co-founder and CTO, added: “Most tools today help individuals move faster. What’s missing is coordination. Felix allows teams to capture their expertise and turn it into systems that run consistently, with humans involved where it matters. That’s how you scale quality in environments like law.”
A fundamental issue for law firm leaders
According to the Positive Group’s report, the adoption of AI in the legal sector “is fundamentally a legal challenge”.
It continues: “Across our discussions, firms progressing most confidently with AI were not necessarily those with the most advanced technology. They were those where leaders consistently shaped how AI was understood, communicated and experimented with across the firm.”
The report identifies three leadership behaviours that identified firms which had been successful in advancing towards AI maturity: strategic framing to actively shape how AI is understood, applied and valued within the firm; role modelling to demonstrate how AI should be used and to lead the adaption to change; and disciplined experimentation – creating structured ways to test, learn and scale AI in practice.
Positive Group CEO Will Marien: “The question is no longer whether AI will reshape legal practice, but how to do so in a way that delivers meaningful value.”
