Theme 1: Culture is the foundation – and the biggest obstacle

Every guest returned to culture as the defining factor in whether innovation takes root. But the sharpest voices in these conversations pushed back against the common tendency to treat law firm culture as simply an obstacle to overcome.

Isabel Parker, Chief Innovation Officer at White & Case and author of Successful Digital Transformation in Law Firms, put it directly:

“Innovation can’t take hold unless you have really sustained cultural change… innovating those organizations is a challenge and to do that you have to impact at the cultural level.”

Yet she was equally clear that law firm culture has genuine strengths that innovators too often overlook:

“It’s easy to sort of over-index on the more negative elements… law firms do incredibly well – they are very, very focused on their clients… “

The risk, she argued, lies in the culture’s relationship with failure:

“There’s not much psychological safety for failure or experimentation. It’s all about precedent and what works and zero risk. And that in a law firm culture can make innovation change quite tricky.”

Her advice to those driving change was to work with the culture rather than against it:

“I think trying to force a different way of working into the wrong hole… isn’t going to work. So you have to understand all these biases, the positive as well as the negative parts of those and try to find a way to link into them and use them to your own advantage.”

Kerry Westland, Partner and Head of the Innovation Group at Addleshaw Goddard, described what it looks like when culture and innovation strategy are genuinely aligned:

“We’re very clear at AG that innovation isn’t this thing that’s done on the side. Like you don’t just have the innovation team when you want them to sprinkle some glitter over the top of stuff. It is fundamentally what we deliver and it is actually a really key part of our 2030 strategy. We’ve got five pillars and innovation is one of them.”

Theme 2: GenAI has changed the dynamic

Generative AI emerged as the inflection point in almost every conversation. Crucially, however, the guests’ reflections were more nuanced than simple enthusiasm. The initial wave of FOMO-driven deployment is giving way to harder questions about value.

Amol Bargaje, Innovation Lead at Mayer Brown, was candid about what happened across the industry:

“Our firm managing partner, our leaders were calling us and said, basically, ‘Hey, what are we doing on AI?’ Literally, that was how it was almost worded. And it was more the FOMO – a fear of missing out, like we can’t be left behind… In a sense, it was being led with the solution first, then the problem. But all of us have come to realize… the discussion is now coming back to what is the problem that the solution – in this case, the GenAI platforms – are actually solving.”

Isabel Parker observed that GenAI has done something more subtle: it has shifted the relationship between lawyers and innovation teams. Lawyers, she argued, are now more important to the innovation process than ever — not less:

“Generative AI has slightly shifted the dynamic a little bit because it is a general purpose technology. You could use it anywhere… In the words of Ethan Mollick… ‘you have to put this technology into the hands of the users and then they’ll tell you what the use cases are. You can’t outsource that to McKinsey or to your tech teams. It’s got to be the users.'”

Own platform – new use cases

For Isabel, value from GenAI must be understood across three dimensions — not just the efficiency gains that tend to dominate the conversation:

“I think about value in three ways. Efficiency, definitely one. Experience is the other and capability is the third. So we tend to jump to efficiency very quickly with GenAI because we see how fast it is… But it’s not just efficiency. It turns to client experience – can we be even more responsive? Can the quality of what we deliver be better? Can the lawyer experience be better? Can our lawyers go home earlier, frankly, or do more interesting work?… And capability — what things can we do now that we couldn’t do before?”

Theme 3: Proving ROI remains hard – but it matters more than ever

Demonstrating the return on technology investment is one of the most persistent practical challenges for innovation teams, and the conversations revealed both the difficulty and the path forward.

Hugo Cassidy, who led the innovation function at Pinsent Masons, described the tension between qualitative and quantitative evidence:

“The further a story goes from the source, the less the qualitative aspect carries through. So you have an amazing story about a delighted client, but by the time it’s gone through ten hands and has arrived at senior management level, it’s kind of lost a bit of its power. Whereas numbers are the same regardless of how many hands they have passed through.”

He also highlighted a structural problem that many firms will recognise: the challenge of measuring impact on complex, variable transactions:

“If you want to measure the impact of something, you run an experiment and then you change that one thing and everything stays the same… If you can get that to work, that can make business cases and actually encouraging people to use it a data-led exercise, which is often people will find very compelling.”

Andrei Salajan, Director of Legal Tech & Innovation at Schoenherr, made the point that crude usage metrics are insufficient – particularly for sophisticated tools:

“How do you measure these things? The more you go into it… is someone doing a due diligence with an AI tool, that’s a whole other value. Is someone – a partner in a hearing somewhere in litigation – being able to counter an argument from the opposing party because he just has the information in some AI tool in a vault and is able to pull that up in real time? That’s one partner that maybe uses the tool once per month, but that one time was that important hearing. So especially with these complex solutions, it comes to measure actual value in the adoption… you need to be smart about it.”

Theme 4: Adoption is a change management problem, not a technology problem

She was also clear that the strategy must be calibrated to the type of technology and the firm’s culture – there is no universal playbook:

“There is no one recipe for tech adoption. It depends on the technology and the culture and the firm.”

Amol Bargaje stressed that mandated adoption rarely works:

“The changes that come about with implementations which are natural or which are smoother… compared to those which are forced through a mandate… In the law firm, of course, everybody is an adult, so you have to appeal to their inner compass and explain to them why this is the most important thing and how this is going to make your life better.”

Jeff Westcott, Director of Practice Technology, Innovation & AI at Akin, described his approach to building adoption from within practice groups — making innovation feel like the lawyers’ own project rather than something done to them:

“If we’re driving the project from initiation and we’re throwing it over the fence at the end, it will die on the vine for sure. So you kind of got to take the long road and really sort of stand behind and facilitate and enable… make it seem like it’s not my project or an innovation team project. It’s your project, it’s your practice and your successful project team that are going to get this done.”

Theme 5: The real competitive battleground is value – and the conversation is overdue

Perhaps the most urgent theme running across these conversations is the question of how law firms articulate and capture value in an era where technology is commoditising many services. Every guest agreed the industry needs to move beyond the billable hour — but few underestimated how hard that transition will be.

Chris Grant, Managing Director of Client Value at Goodwin and a former Head of Legal at Barclays and HSBC, described the gap between what clients want and what they currently receive:

“As a client, how have firms effectively communicated value to you if it doesn’t ultimately come back to a discussion about the billable hour?… Honest answer to that – not very well… What does help is when we start to have the conversations around technology or improving the process for getting things done… It was those bits where firms come forward to do post-matter debrief and really talk about how they were able to do things in a different way – and often this gets hidden.”

His vision for where the industry needs to go is ambitious:

“The dream is we’re in a position where we’ve moved away completely from traditional pricing. Law firms are delivering services that are technology enhanced, focused on getting the right outcomes from the client… Law firms are using data and information that they have through the tools that they’re using to help predict the future… almost the industry flips from a post-action defensive position to predictability and protection.”

Kerry Westland identified a specific tension that is holding back progress:

“I think we’re just so used to badging it to the hour… you’re probably never going to cut your law firm’s hourly rate. Maybe we’ll use less of those hours.”

And on the question of whether GenAI is delivering cost savings yet, she was refreshingly honest:

“It’s not this magic solution that’s suddenly cutting everything in half. And even if it did cut it in half, what’s the value that you’re prepared to pay for that? And that’s the piece that I think is quite interesting.”

Isabel Parker described the opportunity that technology creates for lawyers to reclaim the identity of trusted advisor:

“I was at a capital markets partner retreat in Madrid… and we were asking him about what does value mean to you? And he used exactly those words. He says, ‘You’ve got the opportunity now to become the real trusted advisor to our business, better understand our business, use that time, that productivity gain, to better understand and serve us in a different way.'”

Theme 6: Differentiation will not come from technology alone

As AI tools become accessible to every firm, the guests were united on one point: the technology stack will not be a lasting source of competitive advantage. The differentiator will be people, culture, and creativity.

Andrei Salajan put it clearly:

“Once everyone has that baseline – and by baseline I don’t just mean the tool stack, but also the understanding of what the technology can do, the literacy around how to use it — then again, it’s all about the people… The first component is the creativity and being able to think about technology and the stack you have in a toolkit that then allows you to be very creative on features, services, doing things differently for clients… you need to start thinking in terms of products.”

He also offered a rare note of reassurance for firms that feel behind:

“There has never been an easier time to catch up in terms of solutions and how easy it is to introduce stuff… although we’re now talking about sovereign stuff, I think it’s completely gone, the big debates about cloud. So it has never been easier to prototype, develop and to catch up.”

Kerry Westland was direct about what clients want from their firms – and what is currently getting in the way:

“If you’re putting terms in your panel terms now around the restrictions on the use of AI, we’re going to be caught up in knots for the next decade like we have been with cloud. So really think about how and work with your procurement teams on what you really want from this… I sometimes feel we’re trying to innovate with a hand tied behind our back. If we could unleash some of that, I just think so much more is possible.”

Conclusion: Five questions for senior innovation leaders

The conversations across this series converge on a clear set of challenges. For senior innovation leaders in law firms, these are the questions that matter most right now:

1. Is innovation embedded in your firm’s strategy or is it still treated as something sprinkled on from the side?

2. Are you measuring adoption in ways that capture real value – or just usage metrics that tell a partial story?

3. Have you moved beyond the FOMO-driven AI deployments of 2023 to a clear, problem-led approach to your technology portfolio?

4. Are your partners equipped and expected to have genuine conversations with clients about value – not just hours?

5. Is your competitive strategy built around people, creativity and culture – the things that cannot easily be replicated – rather than the tools themselves?

The answers will increasingly define which firms lead the market and which fall behind.

Catch the full Season 1 wrap-up

Want the full picture? In our Season 1 wrap-up, Anthony Seale and Daniel Porus step back to reflect on the biggest themes across all ten conversations – from culture and adoption to ROI and differentiation.

Watch the full wrap-up here.