Big Law’s Innovation Leaders Have Never Been More Overwhelmed

Welcome back to the Big Law Business column. I’m Roy Strom, and today we look at the hardest job in Big Law: innovation leader. Sign up for Business & Practice, a free morning newsletter from Bloomberg Law.

It’s never been easy to do “innovation” in Big Law firms. But historically, the stakes were never that high. The business model wasn’t broken, and it was never entirely obvious that marginal changes could drastically alter a firm’s trajectory.

Even projects that whipped up sound and fury ended up signifying nothing. Remember what happened after Clifford Chance in 2019 experimented with removing the billable hour from associate reviews in the Middle East? Me neither.

Big Law’s innovation leaders have much harder jobs today, for the exact opposite reasons.

A legal tech company is valued at $11 billion. The world’s buzziest artificial intelligence companies are aiming squarely at the legal industry. Big Law managing partners are leaving their prestigious partnerships to join AI-enabled law firms. But, maybe somebody already vibe-coded their way to disrupting all of this.

These storylines make the stakes feel enormous. The business model is on the brink of exploding. And everybody seems certain that the results of the AI adoption race will be closely linked to Big Law’s financial and reputational competition.

To see what this pressure-cooker has done to the legal tech establishment, look no further than their LinkedIn feeds. They are constantly arguing with each other. Harvey is better than Legora. Claude for Legal will render both products useless. And it devolves from there.

“I am amazed at what’s happening as much as the next soul. I’m also exhausted,” Conan Hines, global head of innovation and knowledge at Fried Frank, wrote last month on LinkedIn. He was teasing a post he wrote, titled, “Everyone should chill a minute.”

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion: Big Law’s innovation leaders have never been more overwhelmed. They’re being asked big questions, and they don’t have all the answers.

“Certainly, nobody wants to say we don’t know what we’re doing,” Ryan McClead, chief executive officer of legal tech consultancy Sente Advisors told me. “But the reality is, if we’re honest about it, they don’t know what’s going to happen and they’re desperate to keep up with what’s happening.”

McClead recently partnered with Claude to write a book on how AI will impact law firms. The AI wrote 79,000 words in a single session. McClead spent time with the tool over the next month paring it into a final draft. The book argues the firms that get the best results from AI will have innovation leaders who do the painstaking work to “make every user more capable” rather than buying the flashiest tools.

Part of his inspiration for the book was to help innovation leaders cope with how much their jobs have changed.

The job used to be about garnering support for projects the innovation team believed in. Getting firm leaders to buy in was the hard part, and it often required proving that some other firm had already done what you wanted to do. Failing felt personal; the boss didn’t buy what you were selling.

Now, firm leaders are demanding AI adoption. The innovators must provide a roadmap—even if they aren’t exactly sure what the next best move is. But one bright side is that failing isn’t as personal. The organizations are more committed to change that risks costly errors (or, maybe worse, catching heat on LinkedIn).

“What has changed is there is beginning to be some appreciation for doing things first or being ahead of the market,” McClead said. “Firms are willing to at least say that.”

Alma Asay, chief innovation and value officer at Crowell & Moring, said her job used to be defined by solving discrete problems.

Before AI hit the scene, her marquee accomplishment was building a firmwide warehouse that pulled in data from disparate areas such as human resources and billing. She argued for the benefits of the project, built consensus to get it approved, and is thankful it has helped modernize the firm.

“It felt very personal,” she said. “You’re talking with a lot of people about changing the way they do things.”

But that custom solution approach doesn’t work with AI, she said. The technology touches almost everybody’s work, and the innovation team can’t build everybody a special tool. So, her team’s focus is to help drive adoption of the technology among firm lawyers. Firm leaders are engaged in every step of the decision-making process, she said.

The job is much more frenetic, she said, but it also feels more collective.

“We are all out on the limb together,” she said. “We’ve all decided there are certain risks that are just a way of doing business now.”

Linklaters this month launched a team of data scientists and lawyers who will work together to build bespoke AI workflows for specific clients and matters.

The team, dubbed Applied Intelligence, was co-founded by Thomas Quoroll, a former structured finance partner who took over the firm’s AI program last year.

Quoroll’s job has involved helping lawyers engage with the tools. He said a “transformational moment” occurred at a partner retreat in September when he realized Legora was a tool that partners, and not just associates, would use.

The job will be a “constant evolution,” and requires a mix of persuasion and storytelling at the executive committee level, he said.

“Because it’s changing so rapidly, we need to be showing people the new things that are coming through,” he said, noting that “agentic” tools, AI that acts autonomously, are the next big thing.

I asked if those conversations ever elicit fear.

“There is anxiety across the industry about some of the implications of the technology,” he said. “But there is an incredible amount of optimism.”

Quoroll has his own reason for optimism: He passed the LinkedIn test. Oz Benamram, an influential legal tech commentator, called Linklaters’ product “a working prototype of the post-billable-hour law firm.”

Worth Your Time

On AI Lawsuits: A custody battle that rose all the way to the US Supreme Court shows how AI tools are giving pro se plaintiffs more access to courts, which are struggling with the workload, Bloomberg’s Steven Church reports.

On Latham & Watkins: The law firm hired its fifth partner from Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, bringing on executive compensation partner Erica Aho, Mahira Dayal reports.

On Restructuring Work: Musical chairs in Big Law’s restructuring and liability management practices continued this week with hires announced by Gibson Dunn and Willkie Farr & Gallagher.

That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading and please send me your thoughts, critiques, and tips.