Clients Are Building the Future. Law Firms Should Help Design It

While law firms debate their artificial intelligence strategies—including, for many, whether they need one—general counsel are living in a different reality. My inbox fills daily with invitations to demo tools that reduce our reliance on outside counsel. My weekly legal ops meeting is dominated by AI opportunities. And we’re not just evaluating them—we’re implementing the ones that fit best.

For the first time in modern legal practice, clients are building the infrastructure for how legal work gets done. But because it’s happening in-house, many law firms don’t see it—or realize they risk being designed around by the systems their clients are building.

It’s certainly not because law firms lack sophistication. It’s because the sophisticated financial metrics that law firm partners examine with a jeweler’s loupe still look healthy and promising. For a century, the basic law firm model worked: spread complex matters across teams of smart lawyers and price work by the hour. When profits needed to grow, the answers were straightforward—increase leverage, raise rates. The model rewarded mastery and control—a virtue until control becomes isolation.

This isn’t a critique of law firms’ sophistication or value. It’s a signal from those of us who depend on them and genuinely want them to adapt before it’s too late. The best firms will thrive in what’s coming. But only if they recognize that the ground is shifting.

The danger is that firms are relying on a trusted model for tech adoption: wait, watch, move incrementally. But AI isn’t like law firm laptops in the ’90s or Blackberries in the 2000s. It’s not about the tools—AI is changing the mode of legal work itself.

In-house legal teams are moving past legacy systems. We’re using AI to structure strategy itself in interactive spaces where we test assumptions and iterate with business partners. The draft-and-confer loop is giving way to co-creation, where in-house and outside counsel work on the same canvas in real time, with AI amplifying both sides.

READ MORE: GC X AI: Reinventing the General Counsel Role in the AI Era

In that environment, the traditional value proposition—“come to us for the answers”—won’t protect law firms the way it once did. It can even isolate them. The firms that keep trying to deliver answers from behind their own knowledge infrastructure—making technology, process, and expertise a defensive moat—will find fewer clients willing to work that way. The firms that meet clients in the collaborative spaces we’re already building will find deeper and more durable relationships.

So why are so few firms readying for this shift? Because from inside a law firm, everything still looks normal. Rates are holding. Demand is steady. Profits are strong. But law firms are optimizing the wrong metrics—getting better at extracting value from a model that’s becoming less relevant. Those metrics obscure what comes next.

For law firm leaders, the technology question on the table shouldn’t be “which tool should we buy?” It’s “how do we reorganize our relationship with clients when the center of gravity is shifting away from us and towards them?”

There isn’t a single answer—different clients will value different approaches—but there is a first principle: You have to start by asking and listening. And being prepared to change.

Of course, clients and outside counsel speak daily. But most firms don’t listen systematically. Partner intuition and fragmented knowledge substitute for market intelligence. Annual partner retreats offer the polite client panel. (As one partner shared sardonically: “I found out clients don’t like rate increases.”) They rarely change anything the following week.

The knowledge gap between clients and firms is a silent killer. Newly minted competitors—AI-enabled entrants, tech-augmented boutiques, and Goliath accounting firms—are working to displace traditional firms. These players are in continuous dialogue with clients, building to what they hear.

To some ears, this is an echo of past predictions. The billable hour has been given last rites since the first hourglass turned over. But AI fundamentally changes things.

Here’s why: AI is the first technology that shifts power from firms to clients. Most tech innovations—whether document processing or mobile connectivity—created efficiencies that benefited both in-house teams and outside counsel.

Most advances actually favored law firms, which had the economic scale to invest in technology and the incentive to maximize efficiency gains. Meanwhile, most in-house teams still don’t have elaborate document management systems.

But AI is now enabling in-house teams to do more work faster without outside help. And AI’s efficiency gains directly conflict with the billable-hour model that funds law firm operations.

This doesn’t mean firms are obsolete, but it does mean the terms have changed. The best lawyers—with deep expertise, seasoned judgment, and a trusted relationship—could be more valuable than ever. But that value will increasingly depend on their ability to work within the systems their clients are building, not from systems that firms control.

Law firms must choose between defending a model built around selling expertise by the hour from behind their own walls, or collaborating with clients to design a new way of working together.

An unspoken truth: While in-house teams complain about rates and Big Law as a whole, we also value our firms and the partners who are our most trusted advisers. We want you to survive—with us. But our duty as stewards of our companies, reinforced by admonitions from our CEOs and boards, is to be more strategic and efficient—to find outside counsel who are faster, smarter, and yes, cheaper. AI helps us thread that needle.

Through an ineffable mix of tradition, inertia, market power, and genuine professional attachment, law firms still have the standing to ask their clients where this is heading and how to jointly create new, AI-enabled partnerships.

The firms that engage now will help shape the future as it’s still being built. In doing so, they’ll preserve, adapt, and even strengthen their client relationships, turning efficiency tools into collaborative networks of shared intelligence.

The firms that wait—the ones holding to the once-valid, still-comfortable, soon-illusory rhythm of wait, watch, and see—are betting on the durability of outdated metrics and the permanence of their own knowledge barriers. They will look up to find that outside their walls, the technology was built and their clients adapted—without them.

Columnist Eric Dodson Greenberg is executive vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary of Cox Media Group. Eric writes about leadership, legal operations, and the intersection of law and AI.