Why successful AI adoption in law firms and professional services should begin with understanding how the work actually gets done.
Ahead of his visit to the Alt Legal conference, I sat down with Mark Burgess, Technology and Service Optimisation Officer at Stephens Scown LLP, to discuss AI adoption in law firms and the wider professional services sector.
With law firms, accountancy practices, consultancies and digital agencies all exploring how artificial intelligence could reshape their businesses, one question is increasingly reaching the boardroom:
What does a practical AI strategy actually look like?
We could have spent our conversation discussing models, agents and the latest legal technology. Instead, we kept coming back to something much more fundamental: the work.
Mark’s view is that firms shouldn’t start by asking, “Where can we use AI?” They should start by asking, “Where is the friction in how we currently work?”
For law firm partners and professional services directors considering their next round of technology investment, that distinction matters.
AI in law firms: an assistant, not the strategy
Mark describes AI primarily as an assistant rather than a replacement for professional expertise.
There are already many activities surrounding legal work where AI and automation can potentially accelerate analysis, preparation, drafting and administration. But that doesn’t remove the need for professional oversight.
Judgment matters. Accountability matters. Professional oversight matters. For regulated professions such as law, questions of confidentiality, accuracy, professional responsibility and governance remain central to successful adoption.
“The more interesting question is not what work AI can do, but how lawyers can spend more time on the work that requires their expertise.”
Consider the activities surrounding professional work: administration, information gathering, document preparation, meeting notes, knowledge retrieval, scheduling and process management.
Reduce some of that friction and something potentially more valuable than simple cost reduction happens.
You create capacity.
That capacity could translate into faster and more responsive client service. It could give partners and fee earners more time to focus on client relationships, strategic advice and business development. It might create opportunities to develop new services or improve knowledge sharing across teams. It could also enhance the working environment for highly skilled professionals by reducing some of the administrative burdens that compete for their attention.
Before introducing AI automation, understand the process
One of Mark’s strongest observations was that some of the biggest improvements available to professional services firms may have nothing to do with AI.
Sometimes the process itself is the problem.
Law firms, accountancy practices and other established professional organisations have workflows that have evolved over decades. A process was designed for a particular reason. People changed. Systems changed. Regulation changed. Offices grew. Acquisitions happened. Teams developed slightly different approaches.
Eventually, the answer to “Why do we do it this way?” becomes: “Because we always have.”
Adding AI to an inefficient process doesn’t necessarily create a better outcome. It may simply allow the organisation to execute the wrong process faster.
Mark advocates starting with process mapping:
What actually happens?
Why does it happen?
Where is information being entered more than once?
Where are expensive professionals performing administrative work?
Which activities genuinely require professional judgment?
What information is required at each stage?
Only then does the technology question become useful:
Could a step disappear entirely?
Could it be automated?
Could an AI agent perform the preparation?
Could information flow automatically between systems?
Or could the process simply be redesigned?
For a board considering significant investment in AI, that distinction is important.
AI adoption in professional services is about behaviour, not licences
Another point from our conversation should resonate with anyone who has looked at an AI adoption dashboard and been presented with apparently impressive numbers.
Giving hundreds of people access to AI doesn’t mean hundreds of people are using it effectively.
Mark argues that more useful questions concern behaviour:
What are people actually using AI for?
How frequently?
Which use cases are producing measurable improvements?
Where are people struggling?
What additional training would increase the value being created?
The difficult part of AI transformation may ultimately be less about procurement and more about confidence, habits and organisational change.
That challenge can be particularly acute in professional services. Lawyers, accountants and consultants spend years learning how professional work should be performed. Processes are reinforced through training, supervision, precedent, regulation and experience. AI then arrives and suggests that some of those established working practices could change substantially.
That is not simply a software deployment.
It is a change programme, and AI adoption increasingly needs to be considered as part of a firm’s wider digital transformation strategy.
How should law firms measure the ROI of AI?
Boards should also be careful about how they define return on AI investment.
Hours saved is attractive because it is easily understood and relatively straightforward to measure. But it may be too simplistic.
If AI gives a partner five additional hours every week, the value isn’t necessarily five additional billable hours.
Perhaps those hours enable the partner to develop an important client relationship.
Perhaps associates can handle more work without increasing pressure on the team.
Perhaps turnaround times improve.
Perhaps the client experience becomes better.
Perhaps the firm develops a service that previously couldn’t be delivered economically.
Mark’s emphasis is therefore on productivity and efficiency rather than attempting to convert every minute saved into another chargeable unit.
That distinction is likely to become increasingly important as AI may encourage firms to think differently about how expertise and client value are delivered.
Why this matters beyond law firms
Although Mark and I were discussing AI through the lens of legal services, the questions aren’t unique to law firms. Accountancy practices, consultancies, digital agencies and other professional services businesses share many of the same characteristics.
Their economic value is heavily dependent on people, expertise and time. Experienced professionals are expensive. Institutional knowledge is valuable. Significant amounts of administration surround client delivery. And many firms still operate business models in which hours worked have a direct relationship with revenue generated.
That makes AI in professional services much more than a productivity question.
If artificial intelligence allows the same expertise to be applied significantly faster, leadership teams need to consider not only how the work gets done, but how teams are structured, where expertise should be concentrated, how services are priced and, ultimately, where clients perceive value.
These are strategic questions, not IT questions.
The boardroom question isn’t “What AI should we buy?”
There are good reasons for law firm boards and professional services leaders to be thinking seriously about AI. Client expectations are changing. The capabilities of the technology are developing extraordinarily quickly. Competitors are experimenting. Employees are already discovering their own ways of using these tools.
Doing nothing is increasingly a strategic decision in itself.
But neither does that mean the answer is an AI shopping list. My conversation with Mark left me with a different set of boardroom questions:
Where does friction exist in our firm?
Where are highly skilled people doing low-value work?
Which processes exist because of genuine professional or regulatory requirements, and which exist simply because they always have?
Where must human judgment and accountability remain?
How will we measure the value created by AI?
What would a dramatically better client experience look like?
And only then:
What role could AI play in delivering it?
Because the firms that gain the most from AI may not be those that buy the most technology. They may be the firms that understand their work well enough to know where technology can improve efficiency, while ensuring professional judgment, client relationships and trusted advice remain at the heart of what they do.
Continue the conversation with Mark
One thing that came through strongly from my conversation with Mark was that AI adoption in professional services is as much a leadership and organisational change question as it is a technology question.
There are also plenty of questions without settled answers:
How should firms measure the value created by AI?
How much professional oversight is appropriate?
Which organisational knowledge should be made available to which models?
How do you create confidence among experienced professionals?
What happens to established professional services business models when technology allows expertise to be delivered substantially faster?
These are exactly the kinds of questions Mark is interested in exploring.
If you are working through AI adoption within a law firm, accountancy practice, consultancy, digital agency or another professional services organisation and would like to compare experiences, challenge some of these ideas or simply continue the conversation, Mark is happy to connect.
Connect with Mark Burgess on LinkedIn
This article is based on a conversation with Mark Burgess ahead of the Alt Legal conference. The views and opinions expressed by Mark are his own and do not necessarily represent those of his employer.