Clients Want to Know What AI Changed. New Research Shows Most Firms Aren’t Tracking It.

A partner forwards you an email from a client’s general counsel. The question in it is simple enough: your team has been using AI on our matters, so what has that changed for us? The partner would like an answer before the next billing cycle.

Producing that answer is harder than the question makes it sound, and it usually lands on the firm administrator’s desk. The time entries do not say which tasks a research tool shortened. The matter budget does not distinguish between a document review that took four hours because the work was light and one that took four hours because a tool did the first pass. The data needed to answer the client is scattered across systems that were never asked to capture it.

New research suggests that conversation is arriving at more firms every quarter.

What the research found

BigHand published its 2026 Legal Pricing and Budgeting Trends Analysis this month, drawing on responses from more than 800 law firm leaders, pricing professionals, and finance managers across the UK and North America. Every respondent came from a firm with at least 50 lawyers, so the picture skews toward larger, more international firms than our own client base. The direction of travel still looks familiar.

On the client side, demand is rising. Fifty-six percent of firms reported growing client demand for AI-driven efficiencies or greater transparency about how AI is being used. Just over half (51%) reported increased demand for financial transparency in general, and 49% reported more pressure for alternative fee arrangements. Eric Wangler, BigHand’s Global President and Chief Revenue Officer, told Legal IT Insider that “client pressure on transparency, value, and pricing flexibility has become structural.”

On the firm side, the response is still forming. Only 29% of firms have adjusted their pricing structures for AI-augmented work. When a new matter needs a price, 35% said lawyers most commonly fall back on standard hourly rates, and another 28% copy the price from a previous matter without adjusting it. And 35% of named partners cited discomfort discussing AI with clients as the most common barrier to proactive client conversations about the technology.

The tracking numbers explain much of the hesitation. BigHand found that 63% of firms now track matter budgets against actuals in a structured way, which sounds like solid ground until you look at the timing: 40% check at key milestones, and only 23% track continuously through the life of the matter. A milestone check tells you where a matter landed. It cannot tell you which tasks a tool absorbed, which ones still took the hours everyone expected, or what the same matter would have cost a year ago.

Seen that way, the headline finding reads differently. Thirty-one percent of firms reported improved profitability per matter from AI, and the same share reported reduced reliance on manual or repetitive work. Those are not ceilings on what the technology delivers. They are closer to a floor on what firms can currently see.

Measurement is an operations problem before it is a pricing one

No pricing committee can report on savings the systems never recorded. That makes this an operations question, and it puts the administrator in the middle of it.

Three things have to be true before a number exists. The firm has to know which AI tools are actually in use, which is difficult when adoption happens through personal accounts and browser tabs rather than a procurement process — a gap we wrote about in our piece on AI as a security question. Someone has to own the reporting, and research earlier this year found that ownership is often left unassigned. And the systems where the work happens — document management, practice management, time capture — must capture enough context to link a tool to a task.

That last point has become harder, not easier. AI features now ship inside the platforms firms already license, which means usage can grow without a single new vendor appearing on an invoice. We covered that shift when AI started arriving through the systems firms already own. There is a cost side to account for as well: verification and human review take real time, and a firm that has built citation checking into its workflow should be counting those hours alongside the ones it saved.

How we help firms get to a real number

Innovative Computing Systems has worked exclusively with law firms since 1989, and this is the kind of problem we are built to take off an administrator’s plate.

Through Managed Intelligence, we run AI adoption as a structured program rather than a series of one-off tool decisions. We start with discovery — what is in use, who is using it, and where the firm’s data is going — so the firm has an accurate inventory rather than an estimate. We help establish acceptable use policies and an approval process for new tools, ensuring new adoption remains visible rather than going underground. We scope pilots with a defined measurement step, so a tool that earns its place can be shown to have earned it. And we deliver the training that turns a license into a habit, because adoption that never takes hold produces no savings to report.

Alongside that, our strategic technology reviews connect what the firm is spending to what the firm is trying to do, so technology budgets support the practice rather than surprising it. Underneath it all, we keep the platform itself safe, secure, and reliable, with 24/7 monitoring and 24/7/365 support from a 100% U.S.-based team, because clean matter data depends on systems running properly.

You should be able to answer the question

When a client asks what AI changed, that question should route to a report, not to a week of manual reconstruction. Getting there is less about buying another tool than about running the ones you have with visibility, ownership, and a measurement step built in from the start. That is work we take on for you, and it gives you your time back for the parts of the job only you can do.

More than 100 law firms nationwide rely on Innovative Computing Systems for exactly this kind of support. We’ve got your back.

If you would like to talk through where your firm’s AI usage and matter data stand today, request a consultation, and one of our Solutions Consultants will follow up to schedule a conversation.