Either you adopt AI in your law firm, or your competitors who do adopt AI are going to take business away from you.
This is no longer a conversation about whether AI is coming to the legal industry. It is already here. But the problem is that most law firms have fear.
In our family, we talk about false evidence appearing real. My E.C.I.B. (East Coast Italian Bride), Maria and I raised our children with the idea that fear is typically made up and that we should head long into fear. Courage isn't the absence of fear, but it's doing what it takes in spite of fear.
Just take our most recent vacation plan. For Maria's birthday, her bucket list item was to go tornado chasing. So we booked it for the end of May, but, unfortunately, for first time in 75 years, there were no tornadoes. Instead, we headed to Traverse City, Michigan has a right turn on the agenda (more on that vacation later).
Our family believes in facing our fears, and we've trained ourselves our whole life to do that.
Law firms should, too.
Take our most recent Partners Club event… We had roughly 100 law firm owners in the room. About 15% were still in the beginner phase with AI. They needed the fundamentals. They were trying to understand what AI means, how it works, and where it fits inside a law firm.
Another 60% were in the intermediate group. They were using the tools. They were experimenting. They were right on the edge of moving into something more advanced, but they needed more confidence and more real examples.
But here is the part that should get your attention… About 25% of the room was already advanced.
They were not simply typing questions into ChatGPT.
They were building agents. They were using AI to perform real tasks inside their firms. They were using it to augment humans, create more capacity, reduce bottlenecks, and drive more revenue through the same team.
If you are still thinking about AI as a chatbot that gives you interesting answers, you have not scratched the surface of where this is going.
What Is Happening Inside Law Firms
Let me give you a few examples.
One law firm owner is using an AI agent to handle inbound leads.
Instead of every call going directly to an answering service, the AI agent answers, follows a script, listens to the caller’s problem, reflects the pain back to them, and works to schedule an appointment.
Is it perfect? No.
Is it efficient? Absolutely.
Is it more consistent than a human appointment setter? In many cases, yes.
Is it making the firm money? Yes.
After the AI schedules the appointment, a human still follows up to add the personal touch and make sure the potential client knows there are real people behind the firm. That may not always be necessary in the future, but for now, that hybrid model is working.
Here is another example.
Many law firms collect documents from clients. Many firms have to review and redact those documents.
Now, one of the attorneys in our program built an AI workflow that allows the team to upload documents into a folder. The AI reviews the documents, redacts them, places them back into the folder, and creates a way for the staff to communicate with the AI if something needs to be corrected.
If the entry-level AI cannot fix the issue, the system escalates it to a higher-level AI manager. If that manager cannot fix it, it goes to another level. If the highest-level AI cannot resolve it, then and only then does the issue get pushed back to the human owner or tech lead.
That was not built by a giant software company. It was built by one person, for one firm, over one weekend.
Was it perfect immediately? No.
Did it require testing? Of course.
But it worked. And it changed one piece of workflow inside that firm.
You do not need to transform the entire firm overnight. You need to start identifying repetitive, expensive, time-consuming tasks and ask a different question: How can AI help us do this better?
Four Steps to Creating AI Advantage
- Educate Yourself
Start learning. Go to YouTube. Go to TikTok. Read. Watch. Listen.
Pay attention to what other businesses are doing with AI and ask yourself: How could this apply to a law firm?
You do not need to become an expert overnight, but you do need to stop ignoring it.
The law firm owners who are ahead right now are not necessarily smarter than you. They simply started learning earlier.
- Play With the Tools
Start using the tools, but do not make this overly complicated.
Use Claude. Use ChatGPT. Use Gemini. Use whatever platform helps you start.
But the specific tool matters less than the habit. Ask questions. Build small things. Test workflows. Explore what it can do.
You will not build confidence by watching from the sidelines.
- Build Something
At some point, you need to move from learning to building.
You can either build something yourself or you can find a vendor that has already built something useful for law firms.
There are companies building AI tools specifically for legal workflows. Some of these tools are not very expensive. You can buy them, install them, and start using them.
The downside is that you may have to adapt to how the tool works rather than customizing everything to your exact preference.
The key is to get moving.
Build something. Buy something. Test something. But do not sit still.
- Hire Tech Labor
Even if you love figuring out the tech, that does not mean it is your highest and best use.
As the owner of the firm, your job is not to disappear into the AI rabbit hole and become the tech person.
Your job is to lead.
You should be deciding where the firm is going, what needs to be improved, what systems need to be built, what levers need to be pulled, and where resources should be deployed.
Some owners have the opposite problem. They are not interested in AI at all. Maybe they are not tech-savvy. Maybe they are too busy. Maybe they simply do not want to learn it.
In both cases, the answer is similar… You likely need an AI assistant. Someone who can help implement the tools, build the workflows, test the systems, and make AI useful inside the firm.
This Train Is Already Moving
The firms that move now will have an advantage… They will reduce costs, increase capacity, improve consistency, push more revenue through the same team, and become more profitable.
There is no stopping this train.
The only question is whether you are going to stand on the tracks or learn how to move with it.
“Change for the confident is opportunity.”
– Nido Qubein
Be confident. Be opportunistic. Adopt AI before your competitors become a threat.
