What makes AI adoption successful in law firms?
The competitive advantage is not access to the newest model. It is the ability of lawyers and staff to use technology confidently, responsibly and repeatedly in real legal workflows.
The gap is already visible. Clio reports that 88% of legal professionals in the UK and Ireland use AI, yet only 27% have embedded it into their daily work. Litera’s 2026 research similarly found that people, talent and expertise—not technology—are the leading differentiator, while 36% of firms identify adoption, training and culture as their biggest AI strategy gap.
Buying licences is easy. Building capability is harder—and more valuable.
Our approach is therefore not simply to build and hand over AI and legal technology tools. We train the firm’s lawyers and business-services teams to run them, adapt workflows, test outputs, identify new use cases and improve the systems over time. This turns technology from a vendor product into an internal capability.
Three law-firm AI training case studies
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Womble Bond Dickinson: CoCounsel Legal. The firm did not rely on a launch email. Its Chief Innovation Officer personally delivered 35 “Cocoa with CoCo” training sessions across UK offices, supported by use-case meetings, recorded leadership guidance and one-to-one help. The result was 376 monthly active users among 650 timekeepers, including 115 daily users. The lesson is simple: visible leadership and practical, role-specific training create habits.
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Latham & Watkins: AI Academy. Latham’s immersive, skills-based programme trained more than 400 associates. Participants worked with tools including Microsoft Copilot and Harvey, examined real legal use cases and joined practice-specific breakout sessions. Training was treated as professional development, not optional software onboarding.
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Clifford Chance: AI and automation literacy. Clifford Chance paired its rollout of Microsoft Copilot and its secure Clifford Chance Assist platform with mandatory AI-policy learning, 12 generative-AI modules, classroom sessions, virtual training and internal case studies. It reported more than 60% daily adoption by April 2024. Its earlier Automation Academy also taught lawyers legal design thinking and how to build bots using the no-code Josef platform.
AI literacy is bigger than prompting
A firm does not need a frontier model for every improvement. Lawyers who understand systems thinking can map a matter, locate bottlenecks, standardise inputs, create decision trees and automate repeatable steps using rules-based or no-code tools. Legal engineers are valuable precisely because they connect legal judgment, process design, data and technology.
Basic AI literacy covers confidentiality, hallucinations, source verification, privilege, bias and accountability. It lets lawyers challenge outputs rather than trust plausible answers blindly.
The winning culture makes this learning continuous. It creates AI champions, safe spaces to experiment, practice-specific workshops, feedback loops and clear human-review standards. It measures successful workflows—not logins alone.
The law firms that win with AI will not merely own powerful tools. Their people will know when to use them, how to supervise them and how to make them better.
