Why Polsinelli Lawyers Won’t Get Billing Credit for AI Training

The chair of law firm Polsinelli says he doesn’t want his attorneys—and especially not his junior attorneys—to use AI legal tools grudgingly. But the firm will not be giving associates billable-hour credit for learning how to use the technology.

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“They need to be very, very good at utilizing these tools and investing in themselves,” Chase Simmons said on Bloomberg Law’s podcast, On The Merits. “If you need motivation to learn how to use AI in your career right now, we probably have other things that we should be concerned about with you.”

“This should just be every day you wake up and have breakfast and think about how to incorporate this into your career,” Simmons added.

Simmons, who leads one of the fastest growing firms in the country, talked about how Polsinelli is adopting AI across the firm. He also explained Polsinelli’s focus on being a “daily and weekly law firm” for its clients and discussed his views on the Trump administration’s attacks on the legal industry.

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This transcript was produced by Bloomberg Law Automation.

Jessie Kamens:

Hello, and welcome back to On the Merits, the news podcast from Bloomberg Law. I’m your host, Jessie Kamens. Today, we’re going to hear from the leader of a firm that, for the past few years, has been steadily climbing up the ranks of the most profitable in the country. Polsinelli posted record numbers last year, with both revenue and profits per equity partner growing twice as fast as the average for big law firms. And the firm’s chairman, Chase Simmons, says a big reason for that is that it likes to take on routine matters for its clients and become what he calls their daily and weekly law firm. But this is exactly the kind of work that could evaporate in the coming years with the advancement of AI legal tools.

Chase Simmons spoke to On the Merits producer, David Schultz, about whether he’s worried about this and about his expectations of how Polsinelli’s own attorneys should use AI. David started by asking him which particular legal industry metric he values the most when he wants to gauge how his firm is doing.

Chase Simmons

You know, while it’s tempting to say, let’s manage to one metric, I don’t think there is one metric. There might be one that you need to improve in a particular year or protect. Profits per equity partner is the one that the industry, you know, sees as most similar across the industry, so you gotta pay attention to that. But the fact of the matter is most of us have slightly different equity partner, you know, kind of structures, and so that changes a little bit. But you know, I think some of the ones I manage to are the amount of our total revenue that ultimately ends up being utilized back for lawyer compensation and benefits. I think that’s an important metric to make sure that you’re, you know, reinvesting and rewarding the folks that drive you forward strategically and are revenue producers. The reason I bring that one up, now with the possible, you know, real rise of AI, and are there gonna be a lot of revenue producers utilizing AI that aren’t lawyers necessarily, you know, do you look at a metric like that slightly differently?

David Schultz:

Well, speaking of AI and legal tools, let’s talk about what you’re doing in-house. You guys have a dedicated innovation department, and, you know, it sounds like you guys are sort of getting pretty well ahead on adopting AI at Polsinelli. Tell me about what you’re doing, and specifically, I’m really interested to hear how you’re convincing Polsinelli attorneys to use these tools.

Chase Simmons:

You know, I’ll say one thing first, the resources we dedicated to AI came after, about a year after ChatGPT, you know, kind of rocked the world, right, and a year later, I just felt like we’d made no real progress and there was a lot of discussion of it, felt like there was a lot of, there was plenty of activity, and, you know, not a whole heck of a lot of progress, and at that point, went to a number of our, of just the most talented people in the organization, not necessarily the most talented tech people, and certainly at the time, not AI experts, but Jon Henderson, the former head of our corporate transactional group for many years, Larissa Marshall, that was kind of the COO of the business department, and Regan Lemke, who’s now the COO of the firm, but was my chief of staff at the time, we asked them to build kind of the business side of it, not being, they’re all very literate in tech, but they’re not tech people, and make sure that what was happening and what the tech team was seeing and exposed to could be run through the lens of the business.

You know, that’s kind of a simple way to say it, but they put a lot in place, and so we really came at it more as a business problem than a tech problem, and when we started doing that, that’s when we really started to see progress. We also made a decision that we’ve now matured through, but it was a little bit controversial. As I said, I want all of our effort, I want to be focused on client service and delivery of legal services, and nothing on internal, improving the way we run our business.

David Schultz:

That seems, that’s really interesting, because it seems like the opposite of the way a lot of firms are thinking about AI, it’s that they’re starting with the back office stuff first and then moving to the client stuff, but it sounds like you’re doing things the other way.

Chase Simmons:

I mean, I think what other firms are doing, and probably many other companies, is probably the most efficient way, and a lot of it’s more transferable. I mean, what would help my marketing department is probably gonna help a lot of marketing departments in lots of different industries. I just didn’t, like with how dynamic AI is, and you know, we’ve seen this recently where, I’m not gonna name names now, some of them are clients, but like one firm is kind of a leader, and one AI company or technology is a leader, and then, you know, six weeks later, everyone’s saying, oh, they’re, you know, they’re way behind now, and someone else, so we just felt like really focusing on that aspect of it, making sure that we stayed out in front.

You know, I think most things that are being developed, unless you develop them in-house, and we’ve developed some in-house, they’re gonna be licensed, they’re gonna be, you know, generally available, and so we just felt like it was more about building that muscle memory and the internal, this is kind of a boring word, but that governance was more important than running our business, that we just felt like we run very efficiently anyway, and it can always get better, but we just, we’re big on making, you know, making strategic decisions and making priorities, and you can’t do everything at one time.

We’ve now kind of come back around to that, that we are now saying, okay, we feel like we’ve got our arms around, we’ve built the internal talent base to really get our arms all the way around AI, now let’s focus on running our business a little bit with it, and that’s occurring, but you know, I can tell you, some of our leaders on the administrative side, they were frustrated that we didn’t, you know, I said, oh, you just, you gotta wait six months, or you gotta wait nine months, we’re gonna get there.

David Schultz:

Well, and I also, I mean, I have to imagine that some of your attorneys were also not super enthusiastic about this, because attorneys, especially within big law, are pretty, have a reputation for being pretty technophobic, right?

Chase Simmons:

Yeah, I think there were certainly some, probably they weren’t very vocal. Obviously, some people say, I tried it, it doesn’t work, and what we were trying to set up is, okay, yeah, you tried it, it doesn’t work, we’ll get back to you, hang in there. So we just spent a lot of time trying to do that, and some people aren’t using it much, but I know that 90% of our lawyers have used one of our legal tech platforms, and we’re in the mid-60s of percentage of lawyers using it every single day.

The point I’m making to the associates is, they need to be, you know, they need to be very, very good at utilizing these tools, and investing in themselves, and all those sorts of things, and so, like, for instance, we do not give, we give a lot of professional development, but we’ve had some people ask, can we get special kind of billable hours for training on AI? It’s like, no, like, if you, you know, my position is, if you need motivation to learn how to use AI in your career right now, like, you know, I got, we probably have other things that we should be concerned about with you, and this should just be an every day you wake up and have breakfast and think about how to incorporate this into your career.

David Schultz:

Now, you spoke with us about a year ago, around this time, you spoke with our reporter, Tatyana Monnay, and one of the things you said at that time was, we think of ourselves as a daily and weekly law firm, not a once every two year law firm, and I think what you meant by that was that you’re sort of wanting to take on that kind of iterative legal work, not necessarily the cases that come up once every few years. Is that right, do you still feel that way?

Chase Simmons:

I think it’s both. I think what I was trying to say is, for the clients that we are getting the phone call every week from, they tend to be those companies that we have that deep kind of working relationship with. In some ways, I think of it as, if any of us were working with a company and they just repeatedly told you, like, no, we don’t want to do that for you, no, we don’t want to do that for you, and you’re like almost, you know, begging to find something that, you know, was sexy enough for them to work on, all businesses have some aspect of that, but we want to just be really careful to work for the types of clients that we want to hear from day to day and feel like we can do their work day to day. That’s not, we can’t always do that, but it’s a good way to think about things strategically for us.

David Schultz:

I guess on the flip side of that though, do you worry that that kind of day to day type of legal work is exactly the kind of thing that could be automated?

Chase Simmons:

Yeah, so first of all, I’d say for us, like some of that daily work is work that we’re doing as a service to the client, not because it’s some massive revenue pool for us. And so to the extent that the client would take some of that in house or that we would find a way to do it more efficiently or that there was some other way to do it, I’d probably one of the first two would be my preference rather than someone else is just better and we couldn’t figure something out. But that’s not the end of the world, because like I said, those are things just that kind of help build a relationship. The bulk of what we do are more unique transactions. And so the point I was making before[OC1.1] is both. So it doesn’t really bother me. And I guess the better way to say it is that is absolutely gonna happen. It was happening without AI anyway. It doesn’t bother us very much. We think we’re well prepared for it.

David Schultz:

Now you’ve had a pretty good year to put it mildly. And I have to imagine there’s some concern if you can keep it up in 26, what are the kind of things that keep you up at night? What are the sorts of things that make you worried that you might not be able to match what you did in 25 this year?

Chase Simmons:

It was a really good year with like those numbers, some round numbers too for us, 3 million profits per partner, 1.2 billion. It was the first time we’d actually been over a billion. You’re not gonna have that every year. And as you get larger, sometimes those percentage numbers are harder to move at that level. I’ve been at the firm my whole career. I can remember times where we were the wrong size. You’re a little too big for this and you’re a little too small for that. We’re very comfortable with our overall size and scale right now. It’s more about a particular practice that we wanna have depth in, a city or geographic area where something we’re really good at, we just haven’t made the traction in that market.

What I worry about, I guess, what keeps me up at night is making the right strategic moves and making progress on the things that we’ve said we wanna advance strategically rather than just taking advantage of the low hanging fruit. Because I think you can when you’re having the success that we’re having, you do get a lot of opportunities. And whether it’s laterals approaching you, headhunters approaching you, other firms. So it’s really more about, let’s grow in the way that we’ve said we’re gonna grow rather than the low hanging fruit.

And then on a slightly more urgent level right now, the geopolitical environment, you do toss and turn on that a little bit. And again, we try to say, where do we wanna be in four or five or six years and then deal with what’s ever happening in the meantime. But you cannot be oblivious to this pretty wild and I don’t know if unprecedented is the right word, but definitely in the last 40 or 50 years, we haven’t had a six or seven year period like we have now where it just feels like there’s always something. We spend a lot of time kind of thinking about that and making sure we know where we wanna be. We don’t know what’s coming next, but we need to be strong enough and resilient enough because that world doesn’t feel like it’s about to get really calm.

David Schultz:

The next question I have to ask you is about the president, Donald Trump. The Trump administration’s attacks on the profession seems like they’ve changed the legal industry, although it’s not really clear, at least to me, exactly how. First off, do you agree with that? Do you think that the legal industry has changed as a result of what has happened with the White House in the last year or so? And do you think that the industry has responded appropriately to what has happened?

Chase Simmons:

Yeah, those are really good questions. It may kind of still be too early. The fog is still on the battlefield or whatever, as they say. In no way am I trying to downplay how material it’s been, but I think the way that I ultimately think about it, all industries ultimately get their time in the spotlight in front of government. And oftentimes, we as lawyers and we as big law are working for them, and we’re used to seeing our clients go through this. And I think this was just, has been our time. And it’s not like we weren’t influenced by government focus and scrutiny before. It was probably more subtle. There was nothing subtle about the last year or so. So that’s the way we’ve thought about it.

And then as far as how did the industry react, when I see some of the firms that were truly on the front page every day, I think you have to step back and kind of imagine the things you don’t know that are going on and what they’re hearing from clients. What I think about in our firm is we don’t take a poll on this, but I know we’re somewhere close to a 50-50 firm politically. We’re by design in every region of the US. And so we’ve got offices and scale in some very blue states and some very red states. And so when you’re in that environment, it does give you some perspective, I think, on, okay, this is something we’re going to have to work through and maybe not immediately decide we want to go into battle gear.

There are definitely some people that I watched live through it that I don’t know very well, but I admire some of the things they did. And I feel bad about some of what they’ve gone through. So you kind of watch it on a personal level. So I feel like we’ve made it through, but I don’t think it’s completely over.

David Schultz:

Okay, the last question I have is sort of about you personally and about where your career is headed. So your predecessor at Polsinelli was there for about two decades, give or take. You’ve been there for almost a decade. What’s next for you? Are you sort of starting to plan to make succession plans at Polsinelli?

Chase Simmons:

This is really not much of a deflection, although I wouldn’t communicate to my partners on your podcast about if I was planning on hanging up the spurs[OC2.1] anytime soon.

David Schultz:

Are you sure? You can if you want to.

Chase Simmons:

Yeah, I probably shouldn’t. I think I’d say this. We’ve noted a little bit of the growth on this podcast, and that occurs against a backdrop of a lot of growth in the industry and the AmLaw 100 firms in particular are getting bigger. And so we talk about succession and preparing for it pretty much every, I don’t know if every day, but every month when I came into this role, we had a lot of other leaders that came in to their roles at about the same time. And we all felt very prepared by the organization coming into that. And so one way you emulate it is you think about it in terms of years and decades and not just like something that happens one time and then you have an election and you do it. So we’re on that all the time. I feel like I’ve got a few years left in me, and some of my fellow leaders, I think they’ve got some runway left as well.

The industry is bigger, it’s more complex. And so there are structural changes where you always have to be even just thinking about are you structured the right way from a leadership perspective? And so we’ve done some of that on the administrative side. We’ve gone from three legal departments to seven legal departments. We’ve done things like that. So that’s ever occurring and that creates leadership opportunities as well.

Jessie Kamens:

That was Chase Simmons, chairman of the firm Polsinelli. And that’s it for today’s episode of On The Merits. For more updates, visit our website at news.bloomberglaw.com. Once again, that’s news.bloomberglaw.com.

The podcast today was produced by myself, Jesse Kamens, and David Schultz. Our editors were Chris Opfer and Alessandra Rafferty. And our executive producer is Josh Block. Thanks everyone for listening. We’ll see you next time.