AI adoption demands the right culture — and the right ROI equation

The Briefing/HSBC UK law firm strategy and investment research 2025/26 found that 70% of leaders expect to use genAI for summarisation as part of legal workflows over the next year — up 15 percentage points from 2024/2025 — with similar proportions seeing strong use cases for knowledge and business functions.  

Despite increased AI use, hesitations remain: 45% pointed to the time and people-power it takes to manage investigation and implementation, and one third cited a lack of evidence of ROI as a barrier to genAI adoption.  

These findings were echoed by the knowledge and innovation leaders from Burges Salmon, Cleary Gottleib Steen & Hamilton, Three Crowns, Eversheds Sutherlands, Freeths, Gateley, HFW, Simmons & Simmon and Keystone Law who attended a recent Briefing roundtable last December, hosted in partnership with Harvey. 

The experts agreed that AI is unavoidable, and successful implementation requires cultural change at every level: from educating senior management teams and clients alike on its value, to cultivating AI confidence among lawyers through simple first steps.  

Many firms are already on an AI adoption journey, trialling different legal-specific products available in the market — albeit one attendee notes AI pilots are taking longer than they ought to. Given how rapidly legal technology evolves, the leader warns that firms trialling products for a long time may find themselves falling behind other faster players. 

What does value look like? 

The roundtable saw mixed opinions on where exactly AI can or is already delivering value. Some are intrigued by agentic AI’s potential to automate repeatable administrative or business services tasks, although one attendee pointed out that achieving such a goal is quite difficult at present.  

Measuring AI’s true return on investment, both in terms of the financial gains and the human-focused benefits, came out as a top challenge for the experts, as both are hard to quantify (the latter arguably more so). As such, firms tend to focus on the low-hanging fruit — looking at the number of hours the AI solutions can save per user and how that translates into greater monetary return. However, attendees note this approach is not sufficient, and leaves the human impact overlooked. 

With no one-size-fits-all way to measure ROI in sight, firms are currently working on setting specific KPIs to get a more accurate picture of the value AI delivers in a law firm — with some firms now tracking usage metrics, like adoption rates and number of AI prompts. One attendee explained that their approach is to ask people to write down what they want to get out of AI, and examine these submissions to select relevant, specific KPIs that can quantify the personal value AI can deliver.  

The right mindset for AI adoption 

Resistance to change also remains an obstacle in firms’ AI journeys — one that could be overcome by means of a cultural shift, argued our roundtable guests. Clearly explaining AI’s value to senior management, clients and lawyers is critical for blunting resistance to change, as is avoiding overselling the tools’ capabilities.  

Letting go of the stereotype that AI is best leveraged by younger people is another cultural shift, as experts note they haven’t seen any correlation between age and level of enthusiasm around AI use. Everyone has their own motivations for AI use, so it’s important for firms to understand these to identify where and how to best deploy the tech. 

As the legal sector is arguably still at the beginning of its AI journey, attendees feel now is the right time for experimentation and learning. However, some attendees pointed out that creating a safe space for this can be difficult if there’s a lack of incentives and provisions, and if the focus remails solely on billable work and profitability. 

While some firms have taken meaningful steps towards this goal, such as offering AI training courses, or bonuses linked to AI use, attendees agree that more can be done in this space to encourage adoption and make the most of AI. However, what exactly this entails (and whether firms are indeed capable of providing incentives) remains to be seen.