In mid-2026, to call a law firm AI-first, or even AI-native, seems out of step with present day reality. Which major law firm is not using AI throughout its practice groups? Which firms don’t have any lawyers that are doing legal work with LLMs in a way that is ‘AI-native’?

When the first New Model Law Firms, or NewMods for short, arrived, such as Covenant and Crosby, back in the faraway days of 2025, it perhaps made sense to call such legal businesses ‘AI-first’, given their apparent head start on the broad use of LLMs.

As Covenant’s CEO, Jen Berrent, told Artificial Lawyer back then: ‘We started on the basis that AI exists, and if that’s the case, how would you build a law firm today?’

But, as noted, AI is now being used by the vast majority of major law firms, and in multiple ways, from simple needs such as summarising and formatting, to drafting and review, to legal research, to even tapping a firm’s collective knowledge to leverage its judgment layer.

Thus today, many lawyers in Big Law – and across the sector – will indeed first begin a piece of work with running some aspects of that matter through an AI system via their desktop, just as they would open a Word doc, or log into their time system. AI may then play a part in that work all the way through to completion – and even afterwards when key data is extracted for future use.…

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