If your firm has spent the past year turning on AI tools, you’re in good company. New research released this month suggests the harder question comes next — and it’s one most firms haven’t answered.
BARBRI Professional Education published a report on August 6 based on in-depth interviews with leaders at nine law firms, from Am Law 100 partnerships to firms operating outside the traditional model. The headline finding: firms are rolling out AI faster than they can measure whether it’s changing how anyone actually works.
One legal innovation consultant summed up the dynamic to researchers this way: “Either there are too many cooks in the kitchen, or nobody is managing it. It’s feast or famine.”
If that sentence sounds familiar, you’re not imagining it. The report found the same pattern at firms of every size.
What the research found
A few findings stand out for anyone responsible for firm operations:
Firms grade their own technology rollouts a C. Not because the tools failed, but because the structure around them—training, governance, measurement—never caught up with the pace of deployment.
Firms know which employees have activated AI tools. Almost no one knows who has changed the way they work. Activation is easy to count. A license is assigned, a login is used once, and the adoption number increases. Whether that tool is saving time, improving work product, or sitting idle after week two is a different question, and most firms can’t answer it.
No firm interviewed has built the AI competency framework its associate pipeline needs. Everyone agrees that attorneys and staff need AI skills. Nobody has defined what those skills are, who teaches them, or how progress gets measured.
The report also notes that responsibility for closing these gaps is scattered across learning and development, knowledge management, and innovation teams — where those teams exist at all. At most small and midsize firms, they don’t. The work lands on the firm administrator.
The industry is starting to respond. The same week the report came out, Am Law 100 firm Akerman created a dedicated director of AI governance role — a signal that attention across the profession is shifting from adopting AI to actually governing it. Large firms are hiring for this. Most firms can’t, and shouldn’t have to.
Why this lands on your desk
Here’s the pattern we see: a practice group pilots one tool. An attorney expenses another. Someone asks whether the firm has an AI policy, and the honest answer is “sort of.” Then a client questionnaire arrives asking how the firm governs AI use on their matters, and suddenly it’s your job to produce an answer.
You didn’t choose the tools. You may not use them yourself. But when there’s no framework — no policy, no approved tool list, no training plan, no way to measure what’s working — the gap becomes an operations problem, and operations problems become yours.
That’s not a failure on your part. It’s a structural gap the whole industry is grappling with, and it’s precisely the kind of preventable problem you shouldn’t have to absorb alone.
What managing AI actually involves
This is the work our Managed Intelligence service exists to take off your plate. It’s a pillar of the Innovative Managed Solution, and it covers the full lifecycle that the BARBRI report says firms are missing:
Strategy and discovery. We assess how AI is already being used at your firm—including tools nobody officially approved—identify the risks and gaps, and define what AI should do for your firm before anything else is deployed.
Policy and governance. We build your AI acceptable use policy, define approved tools and prohibited activities, and set up governance structures such as an AI committee and a tool approval workflow, so the next “do we have a policy?” question has a one-word answer. We covered what strong guidance looks like in our recent post on new AI guidance for law firms.
Pilots that prove value first. Instead of firm-wide rollouts that earn a C, we validate tools and use cases in a controlled environment, aligned with your policies, before anything scales. If you’re earlier in this process, our adoption strategy post walks through why sequencing matters.
Training and adoption. We develop firm-specific training and set clear expectations for usage — the competency framework the research says no firm has built yet.
Measurement. We evaluate operational impact, adoption effectiveness, and return on investment, then refine policies as usage grows. This is the difference between knowing who activated a tool and knowing what it’s doing for the firm.
And because AI governance is inseparable from security — a topic we dug into in our post on AI as a security question — Managed Intelligence sits inside the same framework that handles your monitoring, risk controls, and cybersecurity. One partner, one structure, no seams.
You don’t need a new department. You need a partner.
The firms in the BARBRI research that are struggling aren’t careless. They moved quickly on AI because clients and attorneys expected it, and the management infrastructure simply hasn’t caught up. Large firms are solving that by hiring dedicated governance leaders. Your firm can solve it by working with a partner who has spent 37+ years handling exactly this kind of technology responsibility for law firms.
We manage the framework — strategy, policy, pilots, training, measurement — so AI becomes something your firm uses with confidence instead of something you’re asked to explain after the fact. Your attorneys get tools that are safe, secure, and reliable. You get your time back.
If AI governance has landed on your desk, schedule a consultation with an Innovative Solutions Consultant. We’ll walk through where your firm stands today and what a managed approach would look like: Request a consultation.
We’ve got your back.
