The Slow Pace of Change in Big Law
The roundtable opened with a stark admission. All attendees agreed that Big Law remains up to 20 years behind modern industries, presenting significant structural challenges for transformation.
What's Slowing Firms Down?
- Deep reliance on institutional knowledge
- A 12-month onboarding curve for new hires
- Extremely low attrition rates (<2%)
The Pros and Cons
Attendees described this low turnover as both a strength and a barrier; culturally beneficial yet limiting the injection of new ideas. Welcoming new skills and enabling healthy talent renewal is seen as central to the sector's evolution.
To resolve the latency, the buck stops with technology leadership. All attendees reinforced the point that evolution is a technology leadership mandate; it's less about the front-line teams or ways of working, and more about modernizing leadership standards and talent expectations. In some cases, firms have even completely restructured their leadership teams in the space of a few months to facilitate faster transformation.
The Takeaway
Leadership drives change, not technology alone. If the legal sector wants to accelerate transformation, it requires a new kind of leadership capability.
Leadership Accountability & Talent Development
Performance accountability is one of the biggest roadblocks for modernizing technology organizations. The solution: a “baseball card” model focused on metrics and value delivered, providing visibility and consistency across roles.
This prompted a wider discussion about scaling accountability across firms. Participants agreed that firm-wide OKRs are essential to elevating performance expectations and that Executive Committee sponsorship is critical to truly empower teams.
Despite this, decisions must be made in the best interest of the firm, even when they involve difficult calls, including replacing leaders with less progressive approaches to modernization. With legal sector tech maturity so far behind other industries, it's now clear that “no one is indispensable” when it comes to advancing the firm’s technology positioning.
But how can firms identify the “right leaders” for the job? Attendees emphasized that developing high-potential leaders has now become a top priority in legal C-suites. CIOs often need to prepare rising talent to grow, even when opportunities ultimately take them outside the firm.
The Takeaway
Firms must re-evaluate their approach to leadership to ensure that existing leaders have frameworks to effectively deliver modernization — and to plan ahead by nurturing the next generation of talent to sustain that modernization.
C-Suite Collaboration as a Prerequisite for CIO Success
CIOs now have a stronger mandate to collaborate with senior business stakeholders to deliver technology transformation. Close ties with finance and other C-suite partners are essential; one attendee, for example, described how their CFO partnered with the CIO to accelerate data-related decision-making.
Leaders must also be strategic about communications around transformation. The panel described planting “small seeds” of transformation with influential stakeholders as the most effective strategy to build readiness and shorten approval cycles. The group aligned with the assertion that CIOs increasingly act as de facto operators of the firm, even if this role is not yet fully recognized internally.
The Takeaway
CIOs, and the broader IT function, are now business levers rather than back-office functions. Law firms expect CIOs to influence (not simply be influenced by) stakeholders across the C-suite.
Technology Awareness, Rationalization & UX Improvement
Across the board, there was a call to raise organizational technology fluency to streamline tools and reduce duplication of systems and work. One case study highlighted how improving internal technology awareness led to:
- System and vendor rationalization
- Reduced duplication
- Better user experience
- Increased buy-in for future investment
The Takeaway
Technology awareness drives adoption, and adoption drives transformation.
AI Adoption, Data Quality & Firm-Wide Engagement
Naturally, AI emerged as one of the most energized topics of the session, prompting in-depth discussion around four key areas:
- Use-Case Identification & Collaborative Governance
- Technology Teams Coding Time
- Experimentation & Cultural Buy-In
- Data as the Foundation
Use-Case Identification & Collaborative Governance
A structured, practice-aligned approach to AI was described as best practice, with success often achieved through:
- Use-case discovery
- Practice-group experimentation
- Cross-firm participation
- An AI Excellence Committee to maintain engagement and momentum
Technology Teams Coding Time
Technology teams increasingly coding time was noted as a growing trend, indicating a shift toward greater hands-on capability in modern legal tech organizations.
Experimentation & Cultural Buy-In
Firm-wide engagement techniques (such as a Microsoft Promptathon) were highlighted as effective ways to build awareness, confidence, and enthusiasm around AI adoption.
Data as the Foundation
The group repeatedly emphasized data quality as the central determinant of AI success. In short: bad data = bad AI.
