Legal Innovators New York 2025: Key Takeaways on AI Adoption and the Future of Legal Practice
- Cosmonauts Team
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
Last week’s Legal Innovators New York conference brought together firm leaders and technologists to discuss the rapidly evolving role of AI in legal services. The conversations were candid, practical, and grounded in the challenges firms face today - and underscored a shared reality: AI is no longer experimental or optional. It is an inevitable part of legal workflows and a foundational skill for modern practice. Here are the key themes that stood out.
From Adoption to Measurable Value
A helpful framework emerged for understanding AI maturity in firms, with four key phases: Adoption, Habit, Maturity, and Value - culminating in the essential step of sharing that value across the organization.
Firms emphasized that actual value only materializes when knowledge is shared broadly, not just within isolated teams. As one speaker put it, “Good workflows in practice become precedent,” underscoring the importance of capturing and distributing what works.
The maturity curve encompasses foundational AI fluency, robust prompt libraries, workflows driven by firm-specific context, agentic processes, and knowledge vaults that make institutional expertise readily accessible. Some firms are getting creative - offering innovation credits toward billable hours or even requiring credentialing before using AI tools - to drive adoption.
The Missing Puzzle Piece: Access to Existing Knowledge
A recurring theme was that easy access to a firm’s own precedent is key to enabling faster, more consistent, and higher-quality legal work. Searchable knowledge vaults, context-rich drafting, and the ability to turn successful workflows into repeatable “precedent” are reshaping how legal expertise is captured and deployed.
Firms are not looking to replace human judgment. It’s about making decades of institutional knowledge accessible exactly when it’s needed. While AI is often held to unrealistic standards of perfection, panelists noted that in many review workflows, it is usually more accurate than humans.
Firms are not looking to replace human judgement. It's about making decades of institutional knowledge immediately accessible when and where it's needed. Here's the reality check: while AI is often held to unrealistic standards of perfection, panelists noted that in many review workflows, AI is far more accurate than humans. That’s a fact that cannot be ignored.
The Changing Economics of Legal Services
The billable hour isn’t disappearing, but economics are shifting. Clients increasingly demand price certainty, and they’re not asking if firms use AI - they’re asking how. AI enables firms to operate both upmarket and downmarket, automating back-end work to tackle previously uneconomical matters while enhancing high-end service delivery.
This creates pressure to measure ROI more rigorously. As one participant put it, “Clients don’t want us to train associates on their dime.” That tension is shaping both pricing and staffing conversations.
Training the Next Generation
With AI handling many traditional junior-associate tasks, firms are rethinking how to train new lawyers. As AI takes over tasks that have traditionally been central to junior associates’ training, the challenge is creating new forms of development that ensure they continue to grow into trusted advisors. Innovation teams are exploring how to balance efficiency gains with meaningful skill development, creating opportunities for juniors to spend more time shadowing senior partners, building mentor relationships, and learning directly from experienced attorneys.
Choosing the Right Technology Partners
Vendor selection is becoming increasingly strategic. Proven excellence in delivery means firms are choosing to partner closely with vendors on specific challenges. As capabilities across vendors begin to converge, decisions often come down to the quality of the relationship, responsiveness, and a vendor’s willingness to prioritize feature requests and provide training support.
Looking Ahead
Innovation leaders anticipate that, within ten years, AI and process improvement will be integrated directly into practice, rather than being managed by separate teams. Some firms may even productize their legal expertise, though business model questions remain.
What’s clear is that AI literacy is now fundamental. The firms seeing results are the ones that measure usage, scale adoption across all lawyers, and treat AI as core to how legal work is done.
Byline: Candy Soo, Draftwise