By: Dan Safran, CEO of Unbiased Consulting

Law firms spent more on technology in 2025 than in any year in the industry’s history. According to Thomson Reuters and Georgetown Law’s 2026 State of the Legal Market report, tech spending grew 9.7 percent and knowledge management investments surged 10.5 percent, the fastest real growth ever recorded.

AI adoption is nearly universal, with 88 percent of organizations now using it in at least one function. Yet two-thirds of those organizations haven’t scaled a single AI use case past pilot. And 90 percent of legal revenue still flows through hourly billing, a model unchanged since the 1950s.

The technology is landing. The transformation isn’t.

This disconnect isn’t unique to law firms. Gartner’s 2025 survey of more than 3,100 CIOs found that only 48 percent of digital initiatives meet or exceed business outcome targets across all industries. Just 39 percent of organizations report any measurable bottom-line impact from AI, and for most, that impact is under 5 percent.

The pattern is clear: organizations are buying technology but failing at transformation. The difference between the 48 percent that succeed and the 52 percent that don’t isn’t the software. It’s how they manage the human side of change.

Too Much Change, Too Little Support

The volume of transformation hitting law firms right now is staggering. Generative AI rollouts. Pricing function buildouts. Secretarial team restructuring. Lateral partner integrations. A merger wave showing no signs of slowing. Each initiative demands attention from the same overwhelmed staff who’ve absorbed more new technology and process changes in the past two years than in the previous decade.

Most firms respond to this pressure by treating transformation as a communications exercise. Leadership announces an initiative, sends an email, schedules a training session, and moves on to the next priority. The training often happens before the software is even in use, a classroom exercise

disconnected from actual work. There’s no follow-up once people are in the system trying to figure things out. No reinforcement. No measurement of whether anyone actually adopted the new way of working.

The result is predictable. Adoption stalls. The initiative gets quietly shelved. And firms find themselves in perpetual cleanup mode, circling back to fix implementations that failed two or three years ago while simultaneously trying to launch the next wave of change.

Five Mistakes That Undermine Transformation

The firms stuck in this cycle tend to make the same mistakes repeatedly. Here are five.

They exclude the people who matter most until it’s too late. Transformation gets designed in the C-suite and thrust upon attorneys and staff who had no voice in shaping it. This guarantees resistance—not because lawyers are inherently change-averse, but because people resist change they weren’t part of creating. There’s a difference between asking someone to adopt a new process and asking them to help design one. The first breeds resentment. The second builds ownership.

They treat technology projects as technology projects. Implementation focuses on features, vendors, and go-live dates without examining whether workflows need to change. McKinsey found that only 6 percent of organizations—the high performers—redesign workflows from the ground up rather than layering new tools onto decades-old processes. The other 94 percent are hoping new software will fix problems that are fundamentally about how work gets done.

They ignore ROI after the purchase. Initiatives get sold internally on projected savings and efficiency gains, but those projections rarely face scrutiny once the system goes live. If a firm wouldn’t make an investment without expecting returns, why spend millions on transformation without measuring whether it delivered?

They don’t set adoption targets. What does success look like—85 percent utilization? Full compliance? Specific behavioral changes? Most initiatives launch without clear answers, which means there’s no accountability when adoption falls short. Gartner projects that by 2028, 60 percent of digital adoption efforts will fail to deliver value, largely because organizations underinvest in learning and development.

They launch without defining desired outcomes. Not vague aspirations like “improve efficiency” or “modernize operations,” but concrete, measurable results. Financial targets. Operational benchmarks. Behavioral changes. Without that clarity upfront, there’s no way to know whether the initiative succeeded—and no way to course-correct when it’s going off track.

What Actually Works

The 6 percent of organizations McKinsey identifies as high performers aren’t buying better technology. They’re approaching the human side of transformation with the same rigor they apply to vendor selection and implementation timelines.

They involve stakeholders from the start—not as a box-checking exercise, but as genuine partners in designing solutions. Lawyers, legal assistants, operations staff, and partners get a seat at the table before decisions are made. Gartner’s research quantifies the impact: organizations where business and technology leadership share equal accountability for digital initiatives achieve 71 percent success rates, compared to 48 percent for everyone else. The gap isn’t about technology. It’s about collaboration.

They design for people and process, not just technology. High performers examine how work actually gets done, identify friction points, and redesign workflows before selecting tools. The technology serves the new process rather than defining it.

They establish clear metrics and hold leadership accountable for results. What specific outcomes will this initiative produce? How will we measure them? Who owns delivery? These questions get answered before the project launches.

And they build training into actual usage, not around it. McKinsey found that 48 percent of employees would use AI tools more with formal training, and 45 percent would increase usage if tools were better integrated into daily workflows. A training session before launch isn’t enough. People need ongoing support when they’re doing real work—answering real questions, solving real problems, not running through exercises in a conference room.

The Stakes Have Never Been Higher