For the past two years, most law firms have been watching AI from the sidelines. Pilot projects, individual experiments and a few brave practice groups testing tools in the background. That window is closing.
In the last several weeks, the legal technology landscape has shifted in ways that make a wait-and-see posture harder to justify.
What changed
Anthropic recently launched Claude for Legal, releasing more than 20 connectors that integrate directly with the tools law firms already use, including iManage, NetDocuments, Westlaw, Harvey, Relativity, and DocuSign. Alongside those connectors came 12 practice-area plugins covering commercial, corporate, employment, privacy, litigation, IP, regulatory, and AI governance work. Freshfields, Quinn Emanuel, and Holland & Knight publicly confirmed they are already using it on live matters.
On the document management side, iManage made Ask iManage generally available earlier this year, bringing natural-language search and cited answers directly into the platform where firms already store their knowledge. The company also rolled out support for Model Context Protocol, enabling iManage content to connect securely to external AI tools without bulk exports or workarounds. iManage AI Enrichment continues to automatically classify and tag documents, building the data foundation that makes everything else work better.
The takeaway is straightforward. The tools your attorneys, paralegals, and knowledge managers have been hearing about for two years are now production-ready, embedded in the platforms they already use, and tuned for the work they actually do.
The risk of moving without a plan
This is where firms get into trouble.
When AI tools become this accessible, usage spreads faster than governance. Attorneys try things on their own devices. Sensitive client information ends up in tools that were never vetted. Different practice groups settle on different platforms. Compliance obligations, ethical duties, and client outside-counsel guidelines are tested in ways the firm never agreed to.
The firms we see succeeding with AI are not the ones that moved first. They are the ones who moved deliberately, with a clear policy, an approved tool list, and an internal owner for AI decisions before usage spread firm-wide.
What a structured approach looks like
This is what our Managed Intelligence service is built to do. It is not a one-time consulting engagement. It is an ongoing framework that brings strategy, governance, and continuous advisory support together so AI adoption stays aligned with how the firm actually operates.
We work through five connected phases.
Strategy and discovery. We assess current AI use, identify where data is exposed, and map the firm’s goals against the realistic use cases for legal AI today. This becomes the foundation for everything that follows.
Policy and governance design. We develop or refine the firm’s AI policy, define acceptable and prohibited uses, and establish the governance structures that ensure consistent decision-making. That typically includes an AI committee, a tool approval workflow, and clear documentation that holds up under client and regulator scrutiny.
Pilot and tool alignment. Before rolling anything out firm-wide, we validate the tools in a controlled environment against the policies and the actual workflows they need to support.
Training and adoption. Policies on paper do not change behavior. We build firm-specific training, deliver it to those who need it, and set clear expectations so that attorneys and staff know what is approved, what is not, and where to ask.
Measurement and expansion. We track adoption, operational impact, and return on investment, then refine the program as new tools and capabilities come online. With the pace at which the legal AI market is moving, that last part matters more every quarter.
Why this matters now
Claude for Legal and the latest iManage releases are not the end of this acceleration. They are signals that the legal AI market has moved from experimentation to production. The next round of releases will arrive faster.
Firms with a governance framework in place can evaluate and adopt new capabilities quickly, confident that they are protecting client data and meeting their professional obligations. Firms that do not will spend the next year reacting to problems instead of capturing opportunities.
You do not have to figure this out alone. We have been the trusted IT partner for law firms since 1989, and Managed Intelligence is how we are helping our clients adopt AI in a structured, secure, and practical way.
If you would like to talk through where your firm stands and what a sensible next step looks like, reach out to your account team or contact us. We are happy to walk through it with you.
