BARBRI Report Finds AI Rollout Outpaces Measurement
Even as firms race to deploy AI tools, Learning and Development, Knowledge Management, and Innovation teams at law firms are grappling with how to measure and leverage these rollouts, new research from BARBRI Professional Education reveals.
While nearly every firm has made real progress rolling out AI tools, the organisational infrastructure to sustain training, adoption and measurable ROI has not kept pace, according to the report Driving Change and ROI: Uniting Three Teams to Lead Law Firms into the Future, which is based on in-depth interviews with 10 leaders across 9 firms.
‘Either there are too many cooks in the kitchen, or nobody is managing it. It’s feast or famine,’ one legal innovation consultant and former L&D director told researchers, describing a dynamic the report found repeated across firms of every size.
Among the report’s key findings:
- No firm has built the AI competency framework its associate pipeline needs.
- Firms grade their own tech rollouts a C.
- Collaboration between Innovation and L&D is improving, but still fragile.
- Firms know who has activated AI tools, but almost none of them know who has actually changed the way they work.
- The billable hour remains the most stubborn barrier to AI adoption, and training alone cannot fix it.
‘Rolling out the technology is only the first step,’ said Lucie Allen, co-CEO of BARBRI. ‘The firms that will lead by 2030 are the ones that recognise tool adoption is only part of the transformation required. They will build new frameworks and align around incentives and measurements that turn activation into AI fluency. That requires L&D, KM and Innovation to collaborate to create new development pathways.’
BARBRI assists all three teams to help firms close these gaps. Two examples are its Work-Ready series, which equips new associates with practice-ready skills for the modern business of law, and its recent acquisition of Lega, which extends real-world, build-as-you-learn AI fluency training to law students, legal professionals and law firms.
About BARBRI
BARBRI is a global leader and provider of tech-enabled legal learning solutions for law students, law schools, universities, professionals, law firms and organisations.