AI adoption in legal: Follow the workflow, move with confidence

Collaboration is key to psychological safety

All parties must come to the table and confidently resolve identified pain points if AI adoption is to make any meaningful impact.

• Legal teams must take the time to map out real use cases and pain points.
• IT teams & AI committees must bring these use cases and pain points into a broader technology and governance framework.
• Leadership must play the role of diplomat, getting the two sides to engage regularly and set expectations for tangible outcomes.
• Steering committees or pilot programs running in isolation will not yield positive results. Honest feedback loops are needed between those who design the systems and those who rely on them.

If legal organizations want to build confidence in AI, they also need to make it clear that AI tools aren’t here to replace lawyers. With whisperings of an AI job apocalypse on the horizon, it is critical to demonstrate that the technology’s purpose is to remove or automate thankless grunt work, not to have large language models perform the higher-level tasks that lawyers perform, and certainly not to represent clients in court.

Settling these nerves requires a coordinated attack on repetitive and labor-intensive work that is nonetheless essential. According to the latest Legal Trends Report, up to 74 percent of hourly billable tasks (such as information gathering and data analysis) could be automated with AI. The time given back using automation could be spent on servicing additional clients to generate more revenue, doing more pro-bono work that lawyers care about, or even improving work-life balance to make the firm more attractive to new talent. Prioritize outcomes that rally the support of your legal team, and they’ll willingly accept the challenge.

AI-powered tools like Ask iManage can help build confidence — by providing answers that lawyers can trust because they’re drawn exclusively from their firm's content and data. Because these AI capabilities are embedded within the tools lawyers already use, there are no new interfaces to learn, no need for context switching, and no confusion about where the data came from.

That design choice matters. Each time a lawyer leaves their workflow to get an answer, the work experience fragments, and time and attention are lost. Real adoption happens when the technology respects the user’s expectations for ease of use, quality, and provenance, as well as their time.

Beyond productivity: the human dividend

The case for introducing AI into the legal profession is often framed around productivity: more output, less effort. But there’s a deeper value proposition.

By providing faster access to better answers, AI can help lawyers accomplish several goals at once:

• Give back time.
• Improve work quality.
• Reduce burnout.

According to the 2024 Thomson Reuters Future of Professionals Report, AI can free up around four hours per lawyer per week. Across the US legal sector, that translates to over 260 million hours saved every year. In the UK, the number of hours saved would top 40 million.

Adopting AI tools can also enhance firm culture by removing information bottlenecks, freeing siloed knowledge, and enabling more equitable access to institutional expertise. When strategically executed, AI gives professionals the confidence to share knowledge more easily, simplifies collaboration across teams and offices, and promotes a stronger sense of purpose and belonging.

Momentum can be lost, however, if users don’t feel these gains within the first few weeks of implementing a new tool or process. The challenge is to make AI’s benefits visible from the start. Effective change management in the form of education, support, and establishing a clear narrative about what the AI does and how that helps them (WIIFM) — as well as what it doesn’t do — encourages deeper, more widespread adoption.

AI in law is no longer a thought experiment

It’s happening now, with global firms such as Ashurst stating that 60 percent of their workforce use AI in some form every day. While some firms continue to play around at the edges, others will go all-in, and the chasm in confidence between the two groups will widen exponentially.

The firms enjoying the most success today start with a single problem and map out how AI can help solve it. With a clear understanding of what “good” looks like, from usage and sentiment to time saved and hours redirected, they can roll out a solution with a clear goal and a plan for measuring success.

Selective problem-solving also helps build internal champions. When practice groups start to see quantifiable value in relieving a pain point they’ve experienced, confidence grows and AI adoption unfurls organically, soon becoming an essential part of the firm’s tech fabric.

Importantly, this is an area of technology where law firms’ cautious approach to change can override the so-called ‘first-mover advantage’. Those who adopt AI the best, rather than first, will see the most benefits. It has to feel familiar as well as smart; it has to show up where work happens, make that work easier, and prove its value from day one.

Ask iManage was built with these principles in mind. By embedding powerful generative AI capabilities directly into familiar workflows where lawyers’ trusted data lives and remains protected, legal professionals can access accurate, defensible, firm-validated answers — without ever leaving their workspace or breaking stride.

It’s a whole new way of making knowledge work for law firms, and those who embrace it with care, curiosity, and confidence today will be the assured vanguards of AI and knowledge best practices tomorrow.