How CINOs Are Reshaping Law Firm AI Strategy

When I joined Harvey in May, one of the first things I did was embark on a global listening tour with Chief Innovation Officers (CINOs), Knowledge Managers, and their teams. My goal was to learn more about how Harvey can build domain-specific capabilities that serve their needs.

As any lawyer will tell you, law firms are complex organisms, and Innovation teams serve a hugely diverse set of stakeholders across their practices, where the nature of work (and the process of how work gets done) varies enormously.

We want Harvey to be a service that lawyers love to use, and there’s no one more aligned with our goal of supercharging lawyers than Innovation teams. We’re building capabilities that empower CINOs to do their jobs, and tailoring our service model to arm Innovation teams with the information and tools they need to be the nerve center of AI transformation at law firms.

While these solutions aren’t a default part of legal workflows yet, adoption is significant and accelerating. A 2024 McKinsey & Company study found that 78% of firms had adopted AI in at least one function — a 23-point increase since 2023 — and 71% used generative AI, more than doubling the proportion of adopters over the same time period. While impact varies by business unit, 50 to 70% of organizations reported a revenue increase from generative AI in the prior 12 months.

Lawyers are optimistic about a more streamlined future of work. According to the American Bar Association’s 2024 Artificial Intelligence TechReport, 54.4% of respondents said the most important benefit of artificial intelligence tools was saving time or increasing efficiency.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, CINOs have always led their firms into the future, transforming how their colleagues work with clients. It’s only appropriate that Michele DeStefano’s 2019 paper on the Innovation role found that many CINOs created and designed their own roles. One CINO described themself as an “innovator, intrapreneur, and a business transformer with design thinking skills.”

During my listening tour, I was struck by how CINOs are upleveling within their own firms. Innovation leaders have always worn many hats, playing the role of technology buyers and integrators, advisors, and security and legal experts. Now, CINOs are now product and change management leaders too.

Here’s how we’re seeing this play out:

The top firms are realizing that AI transformation is as much a people transformation as a technology transformation. These tools require training, process management, and data management. They’re not just for junior associates, but have strong adoption and implications across the way all practice areas and levels do their work.

It’s no surprise, then, that firms are choosing to bring in big time consulting leaders like Brian Gross at Morrison & Foerster, or Liz Grennan, Chief Client Officer at Simpson Thacher. Brian was the COO of Boston Consulting Group, where he oversaw global operations and business services. Before joining Simpson Thacher, Liz co-led McKinsey’s Digital legal and risk teams and founded and led McKinsey’s AI Trust practice as a partner.

Reed Smith has even hired business anthropologist Madeline Boyer, who holds her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, to run their innovation lab. Madeline brings her extensive experience in ethnographic methods and principles of social organization to her role, where she works with the firm’s practice to accelerate professional growth and uncover areas of opportunity for innovation in client services.

Historically, law firms have taken an “either-or” approach to new technology: Either firms buy the software platforms they need, or hire developers to build them in-house.

In 2025, more and more firms are having it both ways. With the advent of artificial intelligence, we’re seeing a convergence of these strategies. Firms source third-party tools with the right fundamental building blocks they need, then build a customization layer on top to fit their unique and differentiated needs.

For example, Paul Weiss has been at the forefront of encoding their practice area processes into replicable workflows aided by AI. For Harvey’s part, we love to see firms leveraging Harvey’s building blocks to distill their firm strengths into their own version of AI tools, just with Harvey under the hood.

We’re finding more firms are concluding that this is how they want to differentiate themselves from peers without having to build from scratch. Today’s firms increasingly want to join forces with external teams that take care of the foundation for them, so their lawyers can focus on serving clients.

(By the way — this blog post is not about Harvey, but this shift is exactly why we’ve invested in a custom workflow builder. Using Harvey, firms can distill their competitive advantage into their own workflows, powered by but not dictated by Harvey’s technology.)

As Innovation teams look to build tooling that automates the process of tapping the firm’s collective institutional knowledge and client approach, CINOs’ jobs have begun to converge with a product leader’s.

Like a Head of Product at a software company, today’s CINO leverages their deep knowledge of their “customer” — both the lawyers who will use these tools internally and the firms’ clients who those lawyers serve — to build tools and processes that help achieve a desired outcome. Innovation teams must think through how to drive the education and adoption that will drive their teams’ mastery of these new technologies.

We’re starting to see firms get creative about how to build and deploy solutions. King & Wood Mallesons is pulling lawyers out of their practice areas to refocus on building workflows that will empower the entire unit to serve clients better. Innovation arms are becoming test kitchens, and these groups are cooking.

Any seasoned legal professional will tell you that the only constant in life is change. CINOs know this all too well. After all, that’s why they’re in the roles they’re in. As client expectations get ever higher and technologies like AI move from novelty to necessity, Innovation leaders’ roles will continue to evolve, too – and those who are proactive about the sea changes coming to the legal profession will end up ahead of the curve.