Law Firms Are Built to Spread Bets. AI Rewards Firms That Concentrate Them.
For the last few years, AI progress at law firms has looked like participation. Buy the tools. Run the pilots. Name the champions. Train the attorneys. Find out what works and what does not. None of that was wasted—it was necessary, and every firm needed to go through it.
But the challenge facing firms is changing, and most have not noticed yet.
The bottleneck used to be finding opportunities. It is not anymore. Every partner has an AI idea, every vendor has a pitch, and the technology keeps improving faster than anyone can evaluate it. Opportunity is no longer scarce.
What is scarce is the willingness to say: this one matters more than that one, and we are going deep on it while the rest wait.
Firms are not built to say that.
Practice group autonomy has always been a strength. Partners have influence, ideas can come from anywhere, and resources get spread across the firm rather than concentrated in one place. That structure produces steady, broad-based improvement, which is exactly what you want when the goal is to keep fifteen practice groups reasonably current.
It is a much worse structure for producing an edge.
An edge does not come from firms running similar pilots using the same tools. It comes from one firm deciding, deliberately, that its M&A group’s diligence workflow matters more this year than fourteen other equally plausible projects—and then giving it the attorney time, business support, technology resources, and leadership attention the other fourteen do not receive.
Almost no firm is willing to say that out loud.
Every practice group’s need is legitimate. Every partner’s case is reasonable. So firms default to spreading the bet evenly. That feels fair. It feels defensible.
It is also precisely why nobody pulls ahead.
Why Choosing Among AI Initiatives Is So Hard
Even a firm willing to concentrate its bet often does not know which opportunity deserves it, because the answer does not live in any single office.
The practice group knows where the work is painful. Business development knows what clients might value and what they might be willing to pay for—which are not always the same thing. The technology team knows what is feasible now, what might become feasible in eighteen months, and what will require far more support than anyone expects. Nobody holds all three perspectives at once.
So the question of where to go deep gets answered by whoever is loudest, whichever partner has the most influence, or whichever pilot already has momentum—not by anyone who can see the whole opportunity.
That is a big part of why a $50,000 pilot is an easy yes while a $1 million, firm-backed commitment stalls in committee. It is not that firms lack ambition. Making a real bet requires confidence in both the opportunity and the process used to choose it, and most firms have built neither.
Law firms have developed processes for generating and approving AI initiatives. Few have developed the capacity to choose among them.
Start With One Client Problem, Not a Firmwide Framework
Once a firm recognizes this, the instinct is often to build something firmwide: a governance framework, a steering committee, or a scoring model for every proposal.
That is usually the wrong order of operations.
A better path is to choose one real client problem, in one practice group, with the practice group, business development, and technology team at the table together.
Then run it—not as another pilot designed to prove that AI works. Firms no longer need more abstract proof that the technology can do useful things.
Run it as a way to build the muscle of deciding, together, what is worth going deep on.
That means asking:
- Is the client or business problem important enough to solve?
- Can AI materially improve the outcome?
- Will clients value the difference?
- Is the firm prepared to provide the attorney time and implementation support required?
- How will the firm know whether the investment worked?
The AI workflow is the most visible output. The more valuable asset is a repeatable process for identifying an opportunity, deciding to commit to it, bringing the right functions together, and determining whether it created value.
The next time the firm faces a similar decision, it can say: we have done this before. We know how to do it again.
The Real Advantage Is Learning How to Choose
Do this once, well, and the second concentrated bet becomes easier to make.
The firm has evidence, shared language, and a clear sense of who needs to be involved, where the process tends to stall, and what commitment is required. Skip this step, and a firm can run pilots indefinitely without ever discovering what a concentrated investment might have produced.
The firms that pull ahead over the next few years will not necessarily be the ones with the most AI initiatives. They will be the ones that become comfortable, earlier than everyone else, saying no to fourteen reasonable ideas so they can say yes to one—and find out what it is worth.
That tension—between spreading bets and having the nerve to concentrate one—is at the heart of RISE Above AI Chaos, a business fable about leading organizations through the AI revolution.
It follows five people inside a professional services firm: a visionary CEO, a skeptical department head, an overwhelmed IT leader, an ambitious young associate, and a vendor who makes everything sound easier than it is.
None of them can see the whole picture alone. Together, they have to.
You will recognize them. You may recognize yourself.
The tools are ready. The firms that win will not be the ones that tried the most. They will be the ones that dare to choose.
Rise Above AI Chaos: A Business Fable About Leading Organizations Through the AI Revolution