Adoption has roughly doubled in a year. The billable hour, which still accounts for most of what firms charge, has no comfortable answer to work that takes a fifth as long.
Start a conversation with the AI Adoption Concierge, already scoped to the future of AI in legal. Choose the question closest to yours, or describe your situation directly.
Most firm conversations about the future of AI are conversations about tools, and tools are the least interesting part. The consequential questions are structural: what happens to pricing when the hour and the value of the work come apart; what happens to the associate pyramid when the tasks juniors learned on are the tasks that automate first; and what happens to the firm's position if clients can buy some outcomes directly from software rather than from lawyers. Reported adoption moved from around 28% of firms to around 41% in a single year, with corporate legal departments moving faster still. That pace does not settle any of the structural questions — it only shortens the time available to think about them.
Three structural shifts, each already underway, each with a decision attached for firm leadership.
Systems that plan and execute, the supervision gap they create, and what has to stay human.
investigateThe billable hour, the work that leaves first, and what firms are doing instead.
investigateThe work juniors learned on is the work that automates first. That is a training problem before it is a headcount problem.
investigateHow the Institute approaches the forward view — observed change and named uncertainty, never prophecy.
No, and the more useful framing is that it is under specific rather than general pressure. Estimates put hourly arrangements at around 80% of law firm fees, and that does not unwind quickly. What is happening is narrower: on matters where AI genuinely compresses the work, a firm billing by the hour bills less for delivering the same result, which is a direct conflict between doing the work well and being paid for it. That pressure lands on high-volume, document-heavy, repeatable matters first, and barely touches bet-the-company litigation. Most firms will run mixed models for years rather than switching.
An agentic system is one that plans and executes a sequence of steps toward a goal rather than answering a single prompt — running a search, reading results, drafting, revising, calling other tools. Several large firms have deployed such systems internally, so it is real in that sense. The version to be sceptical of is the fully autonomous one: the Law Society has flagged that solicitors remain professionally responsible for outputs they cannot fully audit, which is a genuine and unresolved gap rather than a transitional annoyance. Systems that escalate decisions to a human and keep an auditable record are the ones that fit professional obligations as they currently stand.
The honest answer is that nobody knows, and the disagreement is substantive rather than a hedge. One view: AI automates much of what first- and second-year associates do, so firms need fewer of them. The other: demand for legal work expands when it gets cheaper, and firms will need people who can supervise AI output at volume, which is a different skill but still a headcount. What is much less disputed is that junior roles change first and most — less first-draft production, more review, validation and oversight — and that firms training juniors exactly as they did in 2020 are training for a job that is changing underneath them.
For some categories, this is already happening at the edges, and the trend worth watching is the shift from AI as a tool lawyers use to AI as a service sold directly to the client. Corporate legal departments are adopting faster than firms are, and where an in-house team can get an acceptable answer from software, the work does not reach a firm at all. This affects commodity work first — routine contracts, standard filings, initial research — and it is not obviously a catastrophe, since much of that work was already leaving via alternative providers. It does mean the firm's position rests increasingly on judgement, relationship and accountability rather than on production.
Describe how the firm makes money today. The Institute will help you see where the pressure lands first.