By: Curtis Brewer, CEO of Litify
In legal practice, performance is not defined by how much technology is in place, but by how effectively work moves forward. Adding more tools does not inherently improve outcomes. The challenge is ensuring AI operates within the flow of work, reducing friction and enabling more consistent execution.
So the more useful question is not whether lawyers should embrace AI enthusiastically or reject it entirely. It’s far more practical than that: What kind of AI actually helps legal professionals do better work, and what kind simply adds more noise?
The Best AI Use Cases Are Usually the Least Flashy
This is where the conversation gets more complicated.
Many firms are not struggling because they lack access to AI. They’re struggling because the legal AI market is increasingly crowded with standalone solutions that promise a quick fix for one narrow pain point.
The 2025 State of AI in Legal Report, which surveyed legal professionals across the industry, found that while AI adoption has reached 78%, usage drops significantly for more advanced or agentic use cases, such as triaging cases and assigning them to the right staff, communicating with clients over the phone, or identifying a missing document and sending an email with the request.
In many firms, AI is purchased as a separate tool that sits outside the systems lawyers already use every day, making it far harder to incorporate into daily workflows.
This is one of the less glamorous truths about AI in legal work: the biggest barrier is often not capability—it's the lack of context and integration. A tool cannot help a firm much if it cannot operate across the entire workflow to take action and keep cases moving forward. That requires access to the full context of the matter, including data, documents, and process. AI needs to “live” alongside a firm’s matter data and documents in order to proactively surface the next step or insight.
That is why law firms should be skeptical of AI that looks impressive in isolation but lives outside the actual flow of work. The more useful approach is to embed AI directly into the platforms and workflows legal teams already rely on, so that it can operate autonomously in the background as part of the actual flow of work.
In legal operations, usefulness is not measured by how futuristic a product sounds. It's measured by whether it gets adopted, whether it improves outcomes, and whether it fits the way legal teams already operate.
Where AI Can Support Lawyers, and Where Humans Still Lead
Used well, AI can absolutely support legal work.
It can summarize large volumes of documents. It can identify patterns in records. It can flag missing files or information.
Increasingly, the most effective solutions do more than just react; they orchestrate. They do this by surfacing case insights and next steps and putting them to work directly within the platforms where lawyers and staff already work, rather than requiring them to interact with a separate AI tool.
What does this look like in practice? It can look like uploading a thousand-page medical record for AI to organize and structure into a source-linked chronology, but the AI also identifies encounters without corresponding bills, drafts a record request, and emails it to the appropriate party. It can also mean using AI as an intelligent timekeeping assistant that automatically captures digital activity, reviews the client-specific guidelines and billing codes, and turns billable tasks into review-ready, compliant time entries.
This can support legal operations by helping firms reduce manual friction and process high-volume casework with greater efficiency and consistency.
But the real advantage comes from pairing those capabilities with human judgment. AI can accelerate analysis and organization, but the goal should never be to replace lawyers with AI. The goal is to remove that friction from the work around them so they can focus more fully on the parts of the job that require judgment, nuance, and empathy.
This is where human lawyers remain indispensable. Legal work is not just about producing information; it’s about communicating it with care. Clients do not simply need faster responses — they need sound guidance, accountability, and often empathy during moments that carry real consequences.
The Real Risk Isn’t the Output. It’s the Foundation Behind It
If agentic AI is layered onto a weak foundation, it can automate flawed data and decisions at scale. That’s why firms need a strong operational foundation before layering in more advanced AI capabilities.
Agentic systems also require full access to data, processes, and context to operate effectively across workflows. Without that, they cannot meaningfully improve performance.
The biggest danger in legal AI may not be that the tools exist. It may be that it’s become too easy to approach and adopt them in isolation from the broader legal operations strategy.
A firm can spend heavily on AI and still fail to improve performance if the tools are disconnected from the way work actually gets done.
That is why legal teams should evaluate AI with more discipline than excitement. Not by asking, “What can this tool generate?” but by asking:
- Does it fit inside the way we already work?
- Does it reduce friction or create more of it?
- Can we measure whether it improves anything that matters?
Those are not anti-AI questions. They’re the questions that separate experimentation from true workflow orchestration.
AI Can Help Lawyers (Hype Cannot)
AI will continue to shape legal practice. That much is clear. But law firms do not need more hype, more noise, or more disconnected tools competing for attention.
They need technology that aligns with the real work of legal professionals, supports better decision-making, and earns trust through usefulness rather than novelty.
The future of AI in law will not be decided by which tools sound the smartest. It will be decided by which ones firms can actually use responsibly, consistently, and well.
Disclosure: The author disclosed that AI tools were used in the editing process for grammar refinement.
Editor’s Note: This article presents the author’s overview of AI in legal workflows, though it reflects primarily an industry perspective. Readers may also consider additional independent research and viewpoints to gain a more complete understanding of the topic.
Reviewed by Irfan Ahmad.
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