5 Questions Law Firm Leaders are Asking About AI Right Now

Law firm leadership teams are asking different questions about AI than they were a year ago. The debate is no longer whether AI belongs in the firm — for most, that decision has already been made.

Instead, CEOs are asking about return on investment. COOs want to understand operational impact. CIOs and innovation leaders are under pressure to identify what's working, where adoption is stalling, and how their firms compare to peers.

At Harvey FORUM New York, one theme surfaced repeatedly across conversations with law firm leaders: the most pressing questions aren’t about access to AI, they're about visibility and impact. Which practice groups are actually using it? Where are we ahead (or behind) our peers? Which workflows are creating measurable value? Who are the champions driving adoption? And how do we demonstrate results to firm leadership and clients?

These are the questions increasingly shaping AI strategy inside law firms today.

1. Which practice groups are actually using AI?

Most firms can tell you how many AI licenses they've deployed. Far fewer can tell you where AI is actually changing how legal work gets done.

At many firms, adoption looks very different from one practice group to the next. Corporate teams may be using AI daily for due diligence, contract review, and drafting. Employment lawyers may be leveraging it for research and policy analysis. Meanwhile, other groups are still experimenting with occasional use cases and haven't yet integrated AI into their core workflows.

That distinction matters. Firms don't scale adoption by convincing lawyers to use AI more often. They scale it by understanding where attorneys have already found value and identifying the workflows driving that behavior. Several firms at FORUM described adoption accelerating only after they shifted from firmwide training to practice-specific enablement. Once lawyers could see how AI applied to the work they do every day, usage followed.

For leadership teams, visibility at the practice-group level has become essential. It helps answer a set of increasingly important questions: Which groups are leading adoption? Where are attorneys finding value? And which successes can be replicated across the rest of the firm? Before firms can scale adoption, they need to understand where it's already happening.

2. How do we compare to our peers?

Law firms have always measured themselves against the market, and AI is quickly becoming another benchmark leadership teams want to understand.

One of the challenges facing firm leaders today is that adoption numbers are difficult to interpret in isolation. A practice group may have doubled its usage over six months, but is that exceptional progress, or is every comparable firm seeing the same trend? A firm may feel confident in its AI strategy until it discovers peer firms have significantly higher engagement in key practice areas. Without context, it's difficult to know.

That's one of the reasons Harvey launched Command Center. In addition to providing visibility into adoption across practice groups, offices, and user cohorts, Command Center allows firms to benchmark their AI adoption against anonymized, aggregated data from more than 1,500 Harvey deployments globally. The goal is to help leaders understand where they stand, where they may be falling behind, and where they have an opportunity to lead.

As Kelly Boyd, Chief Innovation Officer at Foley & Lardner, noted during FORUM, "The new data analytics product is so phenomenal in so many ways and one of the ways it helps is the leaderboard that not only shows your employees' rankings, but against peer firms that you choose."

Rather than asking whether adoption is increasing, the firms making the most progress are asking whether they're keeping pace with the market, and where additional enablement efforts are needed. Because understanding your own adoption story is useful, but understanding it in context is what makes it actionable.

3. Which workflows are creating measurable value?

One of the biggest challenges for law firm leaders is distinguishing activity from impact. A firm may have hundreds of active users and thousands of prompts each week, but those metrics don't answer the question leadership teams care about most: Where is AI creating meaningful value?

Increasingly, firms are looking beyond adoption metrics and focusing on specific workflows. They want to understand where AI is reducing turnaround times, improving consistency, expanding capacity, or making previously uneconomical work viable.

At Harvey FORUM, firm leaders repeatedly pointed to research, drafting, and review workflows as areas where AI is already changing how work gets done. As Shonette Gaston, COO of Blank Rome, observed: "Research that took an associate 18 hours takes four. Motions can be drafted while you're eating lunch."

Importantly, leadership teams need to understand where these gains are occurring across the firm — and whether they're isolated successes or repeatable patterns. Which use cases are consistently producing results? Which practice groups have successfully embedded AI into day-to-day work? And where might similar opportunities exist elsewhere in the organization?

For firms looking to answer those questions, visibility into workflow-level adoption is becoming just as important as visibility into overall usage. Read more about the top AI use cases powering daily legal work with data from the Briefing AI Leaders Community Index.

4. Who are our champions, and how do we scale them?

Law firms have invested heavily in training and enablement programs. But when leaders were asked what actually changes behavior, the answer was consistent. People adopt AI when they see a colleague solve a real problem with it.

A partner showing another partner how they used AI to accelerate a client matter. An associate demonstrating a workflow that saves hours of work. A practice group leader sharing a use case that has become part of the team's day-to-day process.

As firms move beyond initial deployment, many are discovering that some of their most valuable AI assets aren't workflows or playbooks. It’s the power users — the attorneys who consistently engage with AI, experiment with new workflows, and uncover use cases that others can learn from.

Once firms begin looking at adoption data, a pattern often emerges: a relatively small group of attorneys account for a disproportionate amount of usage, experimentation, and workflow development.

Those power users matter because they're often the first to uncover repeatable use cases that can spread across a practice group or the firm as a whole. Recent research from RSGI found that law firm power users save an average of 11 hours per week using Harvey, compared to four hours for non-power users — a nearly threefold difference. For leadership teams, identifying those individuals can provide valuable insight into what's working, where value is being created, and where additional opportunities may exist.

5. How do we prove the impact of AI?

As AI adoption matures, leadership teams are under increasing pressure to demonstrate value.

That pressure is coming from multiple directions. Executive committees want to understand the return on technology investments. Practice leaders want evidence that AI is improving how work gets done. And clients are becoming more sophisticated in their expectations around AI usage, transparency, and efficiency. The challenge is that value can be difficult to measure consistently.

At Harvey FORUM, several speakers acknowledged that while firms can point to compelling examples of AI-driven gains, few have developed a reliable way to measure impact at the matter level. Usage data is becoming easier to track, but quantifying the effects on quality, turnaround time, client service, and firm economics is more difficult.

Few firms have a perfect framework for measuring AI's impact. Most are piecing together the story from the data available to them today: adoption trends, workflow activity, engagement patterns, and examples of successful outcomes. Over time, those signals become the foundation for a more credible conversation about value.

Sooner or later, every firm will be asked the same question — by clients, partners, or firm leadership: What is AI actually doing for us? The firms best positioned to answer will be the ones collecting the data today.