This week on Legalweek, lawyers brought up one topic over and over again: chatter, talking points, and artificial intelligence. It headlined almost every panel and was a strong pitch for every booth. Yet the questions I heard most often, in hallways, at happy hours, and even from people selling tools, were disturbingly basic. “How do I get my lawyer to use it?”
What is happening in Big Law is increasingly similar to what is already happening in the world of technology. Companies such as Atlassian and Block have already linked recent job cuts to efficiency gains from AI, suggesting that the promise of increased productivity through technology could mean fewer jobs.
Billions of dollars are being invested on the assumption that AI will do the same in professional services. But inside law firms, hiring is mixed, even as clients demand faster and cheaper work and investors look to profit from the billions of dollars of capital flowing into legal tech.
A line of lawyers enters the Javits Center. Melia Russell/Business Insider
Legal Week, held at the Javits Center in New York City, is an annual progress report on whether generative artificial intelligence is actually transforming an industry that is cautious by design. This was my second year attending, and the demos were noticeably smoother. AI “agents” were everywhere at the expo, marketed as digital colleagues capable of drafting, reviewing, and executing multi-step workflows that once required junior employees and lots of coffee.
But the conference also produced a quiet signal that the adoption curve doesn’t match the hype. When Microsoft’s Steven Abrahams, who leads product work on the Copilot integration, asked attendees to raise their hands if they were using software to automate contract reviews, one of the most obvious use cases for large-scale language models, only a few people raised their hands.
On stage, there was a blunt warning that if companies don’t change their habits, clients will take their business elsewhere. “Revenues are at stake,” Emma Dowden, chief operating officer at Burgess Salmon, said during a panel discussion hosted by Harvey, an $8 billion startup that sells software to law firms and corporate legal teams.
Harvey’s Legalweek booth was busy, in part because they were offering free coffee. Melia Russell/Business Insider
In the same session, the moderator asked Macquarie Capital’s in-house lawyer Derek Morales whether “AI maturity” will be a consideration when companies choose external lawyers in a year’s time. “I am the judge today” he said, adding that it’s “sickening” to hear companies say they’ve hired a new chief innovation officer while being hesitant to buy licenses for legitimate artificial intelligence platforms.
Lawyers tried all week to explain this tepid response. Dowden pointed to fear. Lawyers, she said on stage, are worried about what automation means for their jobs, how it will affect work billed by the hour, and whether they understand the technology well enough to defend automation to skeptical clients. Anxiety can harden and become resistance. Partners may want the benefits of technology, she suggested. another We test it first at our in-house practice range.
People tend to think that young lawyers are the easiest to convert. That’s not always the case, Sarah Egen, head of learning and development at the giant Cleary Gottlieb, said during a panel discussion. Cleary Gottlieb rolled out Regola, a competitor to Harvey, company-wide. Still, many employees see automation as a threat, Egen said, and they have built careers built on years of expensive, entry-level jobs.
As Business Insider’s Tim Paradis writes, lawyers aren’t the only ones experiencing this anxiety. As industries move further toward AI adoption, layoffs are a common next step. This is a cost of doing business in an era where the speed of work is increasing and companies argue that they simply need to reduce their workforce.
Lawyers are trained to make decisions only after gathering the facts. Speakers suggested that when firms actually invest in training, lawyers are more likely to use the tools because they understand the guardrails.
Ian Nelson, who runs Hotshot, a company that helps law firms build training programs, said during a panel discussion that too few firms offer AI training at all. He said “there seems to be a mindset” that training can’t wait until a company licenses the tool. That’s short-sighted, Nelson argued, since some lawyers will likely use chatbot tools anyway. And even when training does occur, he said, it’s often too narrow. Consider tool-specific demos without context regarding risks or company-specific policies.
The sight of workers dismantling the Legal Week Expo Hall on the final day seems to be an apt representation of the transformation of the legal industry. Melia Russell/Business Insider
Legalweek’s loudest question remains the one that makes vendors uncomfortable. It was, “Why don’t lawyers use tools?” But as the weeks went on, a second question began to emerge.
If AI can indeed produce better and more cost-effective services, at what point does resistance start to look like medical malpractice?
Corporate lawyer Michael Pearson raised the issue during a panel discussion with Harvey. Just over two years ago, Mr. Pearson and former Fisher-Broils partner Joel Ferdinand left the firm to start Pearson Ferdinand, a small, decentralized company that relied heavily on tools like Harvey and operated without employees.
“If you’re not using AI to provide day-to-day legal services to your clients, is that itself malpractice? I don’t know,” he said. “But we’re in a client service business, so we have to explore everything to produce a great product.”
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