The legal world tends to look inwards, which is understandable given its complexity. But, AI’s impact is unrestricted and is affecting all professions. What can we learn from our accountant cousins as AI changes their lives as well? In this piece for AL, Adam Tahir, a CPA and strategist at Bizora, an AI-powered tax research platform, tells us what’s been happening in the building across the street and what it means for lawyers.
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The legal profession by nature prizes interpretation, nuance, and advocacy. Their jobs are to analyze the nuanced wordings of the law and interpret it for their clients. Accounting, on the other hand, thrives on repeatability, frameworks, and systematization. These differences explain why accountants are often faster to adopt processes and technologies that drive efficiency. For lawyers facing growing client expectations around the rise of legal AI there are real lessons here.
Lesson 1: Standardization Is a Superpower
Accountants rely on structured frameworks and for most of us it’s either GAAP, IFRS, or the Internal Revenue Code, and we use that to drive consistent analysis. Even when issues are novel, we turn them into repeatable workflows and checklists. Ask any accountant and they love a well thought out tracker or checklist.
Lawyers, however, often approach each matter as a one-off and that is because most of the items coming across a lawyer’s desk are unique situations, but similar to accountants there are recurring patterns in due diligence, contracts, and compliance that lend themselves to more standardized playbooks. Borrowing this mindset and drafting their own checklist would free up time to focus more on higher-order judgment.
Lesson 2: Technology as Leverage
Accountants adopted Excel, tax prep software, and cloud platforms decades ago, driven by the ROI of saving hours per client. Today, AI is pushing that frontier even further, automating tax research and compliance calculations that once took days. I remember the first time I had to do an ECI analysis and I spent 6 hours going through the regulations.
Lawyers are heading down a familiar path. With Legal AI gaining traction, there’s no shortage of shiny new tools promising to change the way firms work. The ones that will actually win with tech are those that treat it as a way to scale their expertise, not just as a cool add-on. In tax, for instance, platforms like Bizora can turn hours of combing through statutes and regs into minutes. The smart move? Take a hard look at your workflow first. Spot the tasks you repeat over and over, then find tech to automate those. Otherwise, you’re just buying tools out of FOMO.
Lesson 3: The Power of Numbers in Law
For accountants, everything ties back to numbers. Just ask any accountant how they feel when a trial balance actually foots to zero. At the core, we’re here to measure risk, cost, and compliance in black and white.
Lawyers, by contrast, have leaned more on persuasive arguments than hard metrics. But that’s changing fast. Tools like litigation analytics, contract scoring, and deal risk modeling show that law can lean on data too. Adopting that ‘quantify everything’ mindset can help lawyers give clients clearer, evidence-backed advice, and that’s exactly what today’s clients want.
Lesson 4: Communicate in Step Plans
When explaining complex rules to clients, accountants break things down into step-by-step roadmaps. As I said before, we love our checklists. This mostly stems from the fact that our clients don’t want a 20-page memo; they want clarity they can act on and have concrete steps.
Lawyers can take the same approach: translating complex legal issues into clear, structured guidance without losing nuance helps clients make faster decisions.
Lesson 5: Institutionalize Continuous Learning
Both accountants and lawyers need to keep learning as the rules evolve and to fulfil our ongoing educational requirements. The difference is in how fast they put that learning into action. When a new tax law drops, accountants quickly bake it into their workflows. It’s second nature and also valuable because we can model it out for our clients as to the effect it will have on their business.
Lawyers, meanwhile, are great at getting the word out through client alerts or memos. But the bigger opportunity lies in taking it further, i.e. that is creating systems that don’t just talk about new rules but embed them directly into day-to-day practice.
Convergence and the AI Future
In M&A transactions, the overlap between tax and law is hard to miss. Success comes when accountants’ structured methods mesh with lawyers’ interpretive skills, and AI is here speeding up that convergence.
In accounting, AI is already reshaping compliance and research. But the real value isn’t just about citing sources, that’s table stakes now. The next frontier is reasoning you can follow, workflows you can trust, and insights that scale expertise across a team. For lawyers, this is the bigger opportunity: to push legal AI to go beyond producing citations and demand tools that build transparency, structure, and real decision-making support into the process.
Conclusion
Lawyers don’t need to think like accountants, but they can definitely borrow some of the mindset. Structure, process, and data aren’t just accounting tools they’re necessary skills in today’s legal world. As clients demand more clarity, efficiency, and tech adoption, the firms that adopt won’t just keep up they’ll set the pace for the future of law.
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About the Author: Adam Tahir, CPA, is a strategist at Bizora, an AI-powered tax research platform built for tax professionals.
[ This is an educational think piece by Adam for Artificial Lawyer. ]
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Legal Innovators Conferences in London and New York – November ’25
If you’d like to stay ahead of the legal AI curve then come along to Legal Innovators New York, Nov 19 + 20 and also, Legal Innovators UK – Nov 4 + 5 + 6, where the brightest minds will be sharing their insights on where we are now and where we are heading.
Legal Innovators UK arrives first, with: Law Firm Day on Nov 4th, then Inhouse Day, on the 5th, and then our new Litigation Day on the 6th.
Both events, as always, are organised by the Cosmonauts team!
Please get in contact with them if you’d like to take part.
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