
The legal profession has not historically had a reputation for being at the cutting edge of technological change. However, over the past few years, firms have been ramping up their innovation efforts by hiring innovation heads and investing more in legal tech. With the development of generative AI technology, the focus on innovation is becoming imperative for firms to remain competitive.
While progress is being made, some firms are still struggling to keep up. Almost a third of law firm professionals (30%) said they are worried that the pace of AI implementation is moving too slowly, with 41% fearing that delaying adoption will leave them at a disadvantage to their peers, according to Thomson Reuters Institute’s State of the UK Legal Market 2025 report. More than half of corporate legal departments (59%) also expect outside counsel to use GenAI, according to another Thomson Reuters Institute report.
Given those dynamics, firms must ensure they continue to embrace change to avoid falling behind. Here, four legal industry experts talk about their innovation experiences and how they expect the landscape to evolve this year.
Innovation is about rethinking value delivery
We’re still extremely early on in the innovation journey. Most people just correlate innovation with GenAI, but we try to look at it as just one of the tools. We don’t want to just ask lawyers to do the same work using GenAI to make it easier or faster. Innovation is more about looking at the way we work and how we deliver value to clients. Sometimes that is a process change. Sometimes it’s applying GenAI. Sometimes it’s an incentive alignment or a role change.
We invest a lot more in data than in GenAI. One of our key initiatives is what we call ‘legal teams of the future’. We’re looking ahead and asking ourselves what our clients expect from us in three years and how we can design that now. And so the needle keeps moving. We need to evolve to a place where, if we optimise a team, we can actually get the matter done faster – and that might be considerably more valuable to a client. The work might be the same price, but if we can do it twice as fast, everybody wins and that suddenly starts to align our incentives.
Adapting to change quickly can drive lawyer success
Head of innovation roles have been in place for seven or eight years now but with the focus on AI over the last few years, innovation as a whole is now really coming into its own.
Whether it is knowledge architecture, data cleansing, legal design or process mapping, all of these building blocks for innovation are now requirements for this AI cycle. GenAI has been a huge catalyst in this. Also, with previous iterations of technology, you needed specialist teams to come in and help you use it – say, a traditional AI due diligence tool – but now it is the end user using it directly. That’s made a huge difference. But there’s a lot of change happening, so the lawyers who will be the most successful now and in the future are the ones who can adapt to change the quickest.
The other big takeaway has been around collaboration. In a firm of our size, bringing the people who are trained and enthusiastic about the tech together so they can bounce ideas off each other and share their best use cases and prompts is when we’ve seen greater adoption.
Culture is at the heart of innovation
We’ve moved from people saying ‘change is coming, I don’t like it, I’m going to resist it’, to a sense of inevitability about it. As the level of acceptance of change increases, that creates possibilities for people to start to explore what that change might actually look like in practice.
Innovation is all about culture. If you have a culture of innovation, you maximise the possibilities of change. It’s a mindset, and part of it starts with accepting that legal is only good to the extent that it solves real customer problems. So the technology we procure is only useful if it helps solve those problems. If you start to think of everything as a customer problem-led workflow, then everything else falls into place. The technologies that we really love are those that are scalable and can unlock other people’s speed experience. If we can help our internal customers do something at their pace, and we just sit invisibly in the workflow, those are things that we want to use most.
Focus on process bottlenecks to unlock faster ROI
We have seen much stronger uptake and greater openness than anticipated around GenAI use. Two years ago, research showed a large degree of hesitancy that has now turned to optimism, so the market is ripe with opportunities for firms that want to move first to set standards. However, a lot of firms are still in the experimental stage.
We did a paper looking at where firms can generate an immediate return on an AI investment. One clear opportunity is identifying where money is being left on the table due to current processes or workflows – such as correcting associate mistakes or partners spending time getting up to speed on a matter.
Finding ways to innovate around that and automate some of those flows can produce very quick ROI because it’s not supplanting otherwise billable work. I think we will see adoption grow fairly rapidly from here as people get more comfortable. AI will become embedded into workflows to the extent that using it feels natural and not using it feels strange.
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The legal profession has not historically had a reputation for being at the cutting edge of technological change. However, over the past few years, firms have been ramping up their innovation efforts by hiring innovation heads and investing more in legal tech. With the development of generative AI technology, the focus on innovation is becoming imperative for firms to remain competitive.
While progress is being made, some firms are still struggling to keep up. Almost a third of law firm professionals (30%) said they are worried that the pace of AI implementation is moving too slowly, with 41% fearing that delaying adoption will leave them at a disadvantage to their peers, according to Thomson Reuters Institute’s State of the UK Legal Market 2025 report. More than half of corporate legal departments (59%) also expect outside counsel to use GenAI, according to another Thomson Reuters Institute report.
Given those dynamics, firms must ensure they continue to embrace change to avoid falling behind. Here, four legal industry experts talk about their innovation experiences and how they expect the landscape to evolve this year.