Ever wanted to know which legal AI tools lawyers are really using? To help answer that question the AI Adoption Index is launching today to benchmark ‘true AI adoption across the legal industry’. It has been created by consultants Tara Waters and Jana Blount, (see AL interview below).
The two legal tech experts, who previously worked at Ashurst and DLA Piper respectively, said that the initiative invites ‘law firms, in-house legal teams, and legal professionals to participate in the first set of surveys which will allow them to self-report against a newly established AI adoption framework and map this against sentiment across the sector’.
The three surveys are here. Please feel free to complete them, dependent on your role:
(Note: It is requested that a single entry be made for each organisation, whereas multiple individuals from each are welcome to respond to the legal professionals survey.)
And you can also go directly to the main website here.
Waters and Blount explained that the Index is ‘designed around a newly defined adoption framework focusing on four key elements’:
– Alignment: AI is strategically supported by leadership and aligned with the organisation’s goals for its business, people and clients,
– Access & awareness: The organisation ensures its people have access to, and awareness of, available AI tools and how to use them,
– Ability & enablement: Support and incentivisation is provided to enable the secure and effective use of AI in the workplace, and to build new skillsets and mindsets,
– Augmentation: New value is being created and measured for organisations, their people and their clients.
Central to this new framework is the ‘premise that true adoption requires much more than tool deployment, and that achieving wide-scale usage and benefits realisation in any organisation will necessarily take considerable time and focused effort in order to achieve cultural change’, they added.
‘While other industry studies already provide rich data covering sentiment, intention, prediction and individual tool deployment, few look at the question of adoption from multiple perspectives or segments and almost none are built upon a defined framework for adoption,’ they said.
It is expected that the first survey results will be made available during June this year and access will remain public and free for all.
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AL Interview with Jana Blount
– Why do this, and why now?
The genesis of the Index has been in the conversations we’ve had across the industry about so-called “adoption” and the seeming lack of understanding of what this means. There have been studies and press releases about AI in law firms and corporates and usage by lawyers that use this term but in most cases it refers only to AI tools being on-boarded or some semblance of AI use—not necessarily used meaningfully in day-to-day legal work or having any measurable impact on the individual or the business.
We’ve been there and done this… and we know that while procuring the technology itself is a great first step, many lawyers fail to experience the real benefits of technology as their organisations have not taken the steps necessary to drive adoption: ensuring alignment, access and awareness, ability and enablement and augmentation. These steps lie at the heart of true transformation.
Our timing is somewhat coincidental, but 2 years on from the earliest movers having announced their first GenAI plans, we would hope that some in the industry are reaching a point where true adoption metrics are starting to be achieved and reportable. We felt this was a good inflection point to get a snapshot of the industry.
We also sense that there are many teams (inhouse and in firms) believing they are way behind (despite not actually being so) and so their internal conversations may be unhelpfully driven by FOMO rather than on how to best progress through a proper adoption framework. We hope the Index will help to dispel fact from fiction and provide organisations with a more coherent view of where they sit on the adoption curve,
– What do you hope will be the benefit to the market of doing this? Which groups will benefit the most, e.g. buyers, investors, the vendors themselves?
We expect the group that would benefit the most are the buyers, but we could also see vendors benefitting and they may spot where they can collaborate better with their customers to bridge the gap to drive real adoption of their products.
– Will this be done every year, every quarter?
Yearly.
Thanks and good luck to you both on this great endeavour. Looking forward to the results!
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Legal Innovators California Conference, San Francisco, June 11 + 12
And if you’re interested in the cutting edge of legal AI and innovation, then come along to Legal Innovators California, in San Francisco, June 11 and 12, where speakers from the leading law firms, inhouse teams, and tech companies will be sharing their insights and experiences as to what is really happening and where we are all heading.
We already have an incredible roster of companies to hear from. This includes: Legora, Harvey, StructureFlow, Ivo, Flatiron Law Group, PointOne, Centari, eBrevia, Legatics, Knowable, Draftwise, newcode.AI, Riskaway, SimpleClosure and more.
See you all there!
More information and tickets here.