Most major law firms use legal AI tools, yet there has been little significant change to how those firms operate. Why is that? The answer is: the adversarial incentive. This factor explains how the entire legal sector is impacted by legal AI.

How is it possible that generative AI technology that provides so much time saving and that delivers so much efficiency, especially in legal work which is grounded in text and language understanding, is still having so little impact on how many law firms operate?

Artificial Lawyer has watched with great excitement as firm after firm brought in AI tools, platforms, point solutions, general models and more. All capable of allowing lawyers to deliver their work to the clients in accelerated ways that were only an hypothesis some years ago.

And then this site has also watched as it has become apparent that all this AI investment is not moving the dial – at least for many law firms. Why is this? The answer is as follows.

To understand the problem this site looked at the available ideas that might explain this phenomenon. As seen below, the ideas helped explain part of the challenge, but didn’t get to the root of it….until, after an afternoon of brainstorming this site’s founder came up with an axiom that seems to work and gets to the heart of the matter.

Here’s how the logic flowed via a series of possible solutions:…

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