Why law firms' next AI edge may come from how they manage change

In October 2026, Harvey and Legora each launched a product called Intake. Both are built to help corporate legal departments receive, sort and route incoming legal requests with AI, and the two announcements arrived roughly 24 hours apart. Wordsmith had already released its own Intake earlier in the year.

Kenny Gary, CEO of the communications firm LIMELIGHT, documented that overlap in a three-part series for JD Supra Perspectives, and he found the same pattern among law firms. Goodwin unveiled Regina OS, its proprietary AI operating system, on August 14. Days later, Davis Wright Tremaine announced a firmwide expansion of Harvey and Microsoft AI tools. The approaches were different, but the two firms landed in the same news cycle making much the same promise about efficiency and client value. Gary is careful to say there is no reason to think any of these companies knew a rival's plans.

If firms can buy, build and announce comparable AI capability within the same week, the source of competitive advantage moves somewhere else. Lynn Tellefsen Stehle, writing November 11 in JD Supra Perspectives, puts it inside the firm: change management treated as a permanent skill with its own people and accountability, rather than a one-time rollout. She adds that many firm leaders she has worked with know their firms need to change but have no team to lead it.

The buyers already use the same tools

The people reading those launch announcements are increasingly fluent in the technology. Jason Brown, president and CEO of the Association of Corporate Counsel, said on Infodash's Legal Innovation Spotlight podcast that over 85% of surveyed ACC members now report they have embedded AI in their legal departments and actively use it. By his account, that share rose sharply over roughly two years.

Brown's next point matters more to a law firm's managing partner. He said the overwhelming majority of members tell ACC they are not seeing efficiency or cost gains from their law firms. He expects that gap to push more work in-house if it persists. General counsel, he said, want the gains to show up as a visible drop in outside counsel spend, alongside more work done at a faster rate.

Taken together, Gary's catalogue and Brown's survey point the same way. A client that already runs AI internally will not be impressed by an announcement that a firm has deployed AI. When two vendors can ship products with the same name about a day apart, the difference a client can actually see is whether the work, and the invoice, changed afterward.

What lawyers think they are giving up

Brie Leung once served as a chief strategy officer and now runs Red Bird Strategy as its founder and principal. She opens with a question she believes leaders tend to skip: what exactly are people being asked to change? In her view, rolling out a new tool can threaten someone's competence, confidence, autonomy, status or professional identity. What people push back against is less the change itself than the loss they think it brings.

She learned it training legal secretaries to move from WordPerfect to Word. These were people colleagues called when a document broke. The new software made them beginners again. Leung argues that AI asks the same question at far larger scale, because it makes lawyers reconsider where their judgment matters and what expertise means.

Her practical fix is to let the people closest to the work help decide where new tools go, what gets tested and how success is measured, with room to experiment inside clear limits. She also warns that teaching someone a feature or a prompt does not mean they have changed how they work. Habit takes practice, time and support.

That has a budget implication. A rollout funded as licenses plus a training session pays for the first step of adoption and none of the rest. Firms that measure AI programs by seats activated could be counting the step Leung considers least predictive of changed work.

A project charter before the vendor demo

Catherine Alman MacDonagh, CEO and founder of the Legal Lean Sigma Institute and author of Lean Six Sigma for Law Firms, compresses her method to three words in a fixed order: people, process, platform. She sees many firms running it backward. They watch a demo, buy licenses and expect lawyers to see the value.

Her idea for Legal Lean Sigma came from reviewing outside counsel bills as an in-house lawyer. The longer a matter took, the more the client paid, yet the client was never trying to buy time. It wanted sound judgment, efficient work and reliable results. That is the same tension Brown describes from the ACC side, decades later and with AI added.

MacDonagh's alternative is a written project charter that defines the problem, the goal, who is responsible, the resources needed and how success will be measured. She rejects the idea that change belongs to one title such as innovation or technology lead. Each project instead gets its own structure:

• Someone who owns the process
• A leader for the project
• A sponsor at the executive level
• A steering committee
• People who know the work that will change

Her test question for leaders is whether they are solving a real problem or reacting to the market. Gary describes the market-reaction path in detail in the second part of his series. Organizations watch competitors, spot capabilities gaining traction, build their own versions and then ask marketing to show they are keeping pace. The result, he writes, is communications that repeat the features and trends a rival already claimed. MacDonagh's charter is a brake on exactly that loop, because it forces the problem statement to come from users rather than from a competitor's press release.

Direction from the top, meaning from practice leaders

Jen Leonard, founder of Creative Lawyers and former chief innovation officer at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, reduces it to a plain point: organizations do not change, people do. She calls the gap between announcement and action "innovation by press release": a strategy, a named leader, a platform, a pilot and a launch notice, with no structure or local ownership behind them.

Her model needs two layers. Firm leaders set a broad goal. Practice leaders, partners and team leaders then translate it into what it means for their own people, with repetition, visible progress and credit for those who try new things. Leonard also treats psychological safety as a working requirement. An associate may fear a tool devalues years of skill-building, and a partner may worry a new delivery model cuts into reliable revenue. Those concerns have to be raised and worked through, she argues, because a strategy deck will not dissolve them.

The strongest objection to this reading comes from Gary himself. He concedes that some convergence is inevitable: companies hear the same customers and face the same pressures, and simultaneous launches can signal a maturing market. He also points to firms that stand apart through their history. Thompson Hine's AI-enabled SmartPaTH Plus rests on more than a decade of investment in its SmartPaTH delivery model. That example, though, fits the change-management reading: ten years of operating a delivery model is the sustained capacity Stehle describes.

Three questions before the next rollout

Stehle's own point is that hiring an innovation, technology or AI leader is a start but not enough. Change management, she argues, needs a seat next to strategy, operations, technology, talent and client service, with dedicated people, time and accountability. For firms whose AI announcements look much like a rival's, that seat is where differentiation could still be built.

Gary's third installment, promised on positioning, timing and strategic alignment, is the next marker in this conversation. The more telling signal sits with clients. If ACC members begin reporting that law firm AI investments show up as lower or more predictable outside counsel spend, the firms that staffed the change work should be the ones named.