How do law firms decide which AI requests to fund?
Not by whoever asks loudest, at least not on paper. About 40% of mid-size firms now route AI requests through a committee or an approval process. Yet 44% still have no formal way to tell a senior partner no, and on plenty of weeks the loudest voice wins anyway. The firms making real progress share one habit: they tie tool access to proven use before the first pilot, not after the unused licenses pile up. The problem underneath all of it is shelfware, tools bought under pressure and touched by almost no one.
| What mid-size firms report | Share |
|---|---|
| Have no formal mechanism to turn down a request | 44% |
| Route AI requests through a committee or approval process | 40% |
| Deliberately reward early adopters first | 16% |
Committees are the default answer, and authority is their weak point
Roughly 40% of firms built some version of an AI committee, a technology committee, or an approval process to route requests through. On paper that is governance. In practice it only works if the group can actually reject a request, including one from a senior partner. A committee that meets on schedule but cannot say no does not improve decisions. It just adds a step, and slows everything down while the real decision defaults to whoever pushes hardest.
Shelfware is the crisis nobody names in the meeting
The same story shows up across firm after firm: a tool bought under pressure from a senior voice, used by a handful of people, ignored by everyone else. One firm was blunt about it, saying the honest answer is they are trying to stop buying before they have built the habit. Money spent on licenses no one opens is not a technology problem. It is a governance failure, and it is the direct cost of letting the loudest request set the budget.
Pilot groups are becoming the standard
The model more and more firms are landing on looks the same: one representative per practice area, licenses handed out selectively against a real use case, and a deliberate path from pilot to firm-wide rollout. The firms doing this describe it as a way to generate proof, not just to manage politics. It gives the committee something better than an opinion to point to when the next request comes in, which is the actual adoption data from the last one.
Access is starting to follow accountability, not volume
The clearest shift in this group is firms tying tool access to measurable outcomes, whether billable hours, case volume, or a documented efficiency gain. Some now counsel attorneys who request a tool and then never use it, with the license revoked as the consequence. That is a real move from who asked loudest to who delivered, and the firms that make it early, while it is still a process question and not yet a named partner's pet project, are the ones that avoid the shelfware pile in the first place.
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