How agentic AI raises the bar for law firms

The legal world is looking to scale AI beyond chatbots, bringing in agents to automate parts of lawyers’ workflows. While adoption is growing rapidly, some firms are moving slower than others. Laura Mandaro, managing editor at The Information, talked to three legal experts about how firms can overcome pushback, encourage adoption and measure AI’s returns.

• Isabel Parker, Chief Innovation Officer, White & Case
• Jillian Burnett, VP Engagement, Legora
• Sunita Verma, CTO, Ironclad

The agent advantage

At many law firms, drafting non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) are a time sink. Sunita Verma of Ironclad, an AI-driven contract management company, said this is a workflow that can easily be outsourced to an agent.

“One of the themes we hear consistently from our customers is that they want their lawyers spending less time on NDAs and more time on strategic deals,” she said. For some clients that have outsourced NDAs to AI, the time saved has made it possible to bring work previously handled by external legal providers in-house.

But not every law firm has embraced AI. Isabel Parker said that while lawyers at White & Case were comfortable using AI for basics like summarizing documents, most remained resistant to a wider rollout of agents.

The firm does use agents to improve client experiences, mostly through client-specific skills that capture preferences, from tone of voice to who needs to be included on contracts and communications. The skills make institutional knowledge easier to share.

“In the past, a lawyer might say, ‘I’m about to submit this to X client, how do they like to see it again? Has anyone written this down?’ And emails would be flying around and everyone’s hair on fire,” Parker said. “This makes it much more streamlined.”

Getting lawyers on board

Jillian Burnett acknowledges that skepticism from lawyers can be a barrier to adopting agentic tools like Legora, the agentic operating system for legal work. A bigger obstacle, she said, is AI fatigue, and an understandable unwillingness to sacrifice time for training with vendors to learn new tools.

“If you just released a new functionality and they just went through training on our assistant, lawyers aren’t necessarily going to want to give you more of their billable time to learn something new,” she said. She stressed the importance of showing lawyers what the platform and its agents can deliver through individual training sessions and small focus groups, noting that lawyers will give you their time when it’s clearly worth it.

“By the time Legora walks into a meeting with a customer, we already understand their workflows and can present use cases directly relevant to the matters on their desk,” she said.

Another challenge is deciding which skills to operationalize.

“When you have a lot of people creating skills, it can get super noisy,” she said. One way to reduce that noise is to set up knowledge teams or steering committees made up of innovation leads, senior partners and other decision-makers to help set the criteria for which skills should become firm-wide standards. Legora can then help users find skills through tags, such as practice areas, and give firms control over how broadly those skills are shared.

Factoring in the costs

As vendors move to consumption-based pricing, law firms face costs that are far harder to predict.

“Accounting for technology spend is entirely new for law firms. It’s utterly unpredictable and we’re just not set up for it yet,” Parker said.

Legora uses customer data to help clients forecast consumption and track spending.

“We’re working with our clients day in and day out to provide them with visibility into their consumption patterns, and to offer suggestions on how to optimize their credit consumption,” Burnett said.

Burnett said the baseline metrics are efficiency, speed and reduced risk. For some clients, that means keeping headcount flat while absorbing more work; for others, faster client turnarounds.

Parker urged firms to take a longer-term view, ensuring that developing talent doesn’t become a casualty of chasing efficiency. White & Case is preserving opportunities for junior lawyers to learn rather than automating every task. Verma said Ironclad takes a similar approach with developers.

“We made a very conscious decision to pair our senior developers with junior developers so they can learn that art of judgment, which is something that AI will never be able to replace,” she said.