It is late September 2026. Sixteen months ago, our first report established that AI adoption was becoming inevitable across UK law firms. Since then, we’ve tracked the story through a hardening client mandate (September 2025), a warning about the collapsing training pipeline in ‘Broken Ladder’ (January 2026), and the reckoning with the billable hour in May. At every stage, the story has been usage curves climbing, budgets growing and tools proliferating.

That story has now changed. Our new report, ‘The AI Value Gap’, asks a more uncomfortable question: your firm has probably already adopted AI, so why isn’t it paying off?

Thomson Reuters’ 2026 Future of Professionals research found that 91% of fee earners believe their own organisations are falling short of what AI could realistically deliver. This is not a story about under-investment. Firms with a genuinely visible AI strategy are nearly four times more likely to see measurable return than those without one – and yet most firms and legal departments still cannot tell you what their return actually is. Only 18% collect ROI metrics in any systematic way.

Meanwhile, in several major US firms, billable hours are rising even as AI use grows – and nobody has offered a convincing account of where the promised time savings went.…

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