An Innovation Race Is on to Pick the Top Law Firms of the Future

The days of the yellow legal pad are numbered. Tech in all its forms is table stakes for law firms these days—from dashboarding to AI.

Law firms that were merely experimenting with AI a couple years ago have moved into regular use of the technology. Firms are also tapping into internal data analytics to boost their attorneys’ productivity, attract new business, and help expand their offerings to clients.

“Today, in the year 2025, if you’re not using data analytics, you’re not in the game,“ said Danny David, managing partner of Houston-based Baker Botts. His firm views AI as a competitive advantage and, over time, a source of real leverage for practices.

Innovation heads at other major law firms agree. Using data analytics, sharing dashboards with attorneys, and deploying in-house and third-party generative AI tools are now requirements for firms to gain efficiency and even increase profits.

Bloomberg Law’s inaugural Leading Law Firms survey asked firms to provide information such as revenue and headcount as a measure of past performance, as well as to answer several questions about growth and innovation to provide a glimpse into the firm’s future. Of the nearly 100 firms surveyed, over 60 said they are using data analytics tools to understand and build their own business and nearly half said they are using generative AI technologies to assist attorneys and their clients.

Seyfarth Shaw, Baker Botts, and McDermott Will & Emery nabbed the top scores in terms of the innovation questions involving the use of generative AI, data warehousing, data analytics, and dashboarding to drive their business, and support clients.

Seyfarth uses generative AI to arm its attorneys with more information in a faster capacity. Baker Botts uses AI and data analytics to gain efficiency in lawyers’ daily workflow. McDermott is looking to tech as a way to stand out from the competition.

Read more: See which firms came out on top in Business & Innovation in Bloomberg Law’s Leading Law Firms.

“I don’t think you can really survive at some point without some strategy on how you’re going to leverage these tools to be more effective and efficient,” said Maureen Naughton, Lowenstein Sandler’s chief administrative officer.

Michael Shea, the chief information officer at Chicago-based McDermott, said the firm’s use of proprietary generative AI tools is a differentiator in the marketplace, helping the firm compete with other firms and practice areas.

The firm has a $20 million investment in the Legal Tech Fund to help shape the tech and, hopefully, said firm chair Ira Coleman, to future proof the firm.

“We not looking to make a lot of money on that, although that would be nice, but that’s not the purpose. The purpose is to be cutting edge,” said Coleman.

Listen to Coleman talk about what the successful firm of the future looks like on Bloomberg Law’s On the Merits.

Chicago-based Seyfarth’s Lorie Almon, the firm’s chair and managing partner, said that while the operation has significant breadth, with offices around the world, they bring a “broad buy-in to the power of analytics and AI” to distinguish their firm.

“Using AI to optimize work will soon just be table stakes—if that’s not the case already,” she said.

Naughton at Lowenstein takes that sentiment even further, saying it’s “bad business practice” if companies don’t use data analytics and generative AI to cut time on basic tasks, like structuring agreements—which can be reduced from three days down to a few minutes with the help of AI.

Half of firms that responded to innovation questions said they utilized dashboards—or visual representations of charts and graphs—to display key performance indicators.

Dan Szabo, the senior director of innovation at the Davis Wright Tremaine, said dashboards give insight into the budget and spend for clients and what value they are getting out of the firm. That, in turn, helps clients budget on their side as well. He said internally, Davis Wright uses data analytics as a central hub to track clients and subject matter expertise of attorneys.

“There were lots of low-effort, high-impact opportunities that we could capitalize on. And so we were able to move the needle very, very far, very quickly with just rudimentary information,” Szabo said.

Ballard Spahr drove profitability more than 30% from 2019 to 2022 after using data analytics and internal enterprise data warehouse systems, said Lisa Mayo Haynes, the firm’s senior director of technology innovation. It was transformational to use prescriptive and predictive data to focus on ways each partner could improve profitability, said Mayo Haynes.

Mayo Haynes said the firm gave attorneys specific examples of things they could do with clients to raise profitability and used data and business intelligence tools to gain small incremental improvements. The firm also deployed data warehousing, the practice of collecting data from wide resources to a single database to be used for business intelligence and to guide management.

And, of course, there’s AI, which is working its way into firms’ internal and client-facing practices. Some firms build, some firms buy, but either way, most firms have embraced generative AI.

“I think the top 10 firms of the 2030s are being determined right now, and AI adoption is a critical component of that,” Szabo said.

Davis Wright Tremaine has developed DWT.ai, its own in-house generative AI system, which can provide a high-level view of all the subject matter expertise and backgrounds for attorneys in one place.

Ballard Spahr has also built its own in-house generative AI tools for their clients.

“It’s not just about getting data in the cloud. It’s really about getting it in the best possible shape so that the firm can have confidence in the data,” Mayo Haynes said. “If they have no confidence in the data that you’re presenting to them, they’re not going to use what you provide,” she said.