Trade-offs
What AI takes away.
Most writing about AI is about what you gain. This page is about three things it costs a law firm, and what I'd do about each. None of them is a reason not to use AI.
It can crowd out conversation inside the firm.
If memos, client updates, and the questions you'd normally ask a colleague all go through a chat window instead, the firm loses the exchanges where trust is built and judgment is passed on: the question in the hallway, the call where you hear a client hesitate, the partner explaining why a draft was wrong.
It makes it easy to stop checking.
When output is fluent and mostly correct, people review it less. Studies of knowledge workers have found the same pattern: the more people trust a tool, the less they scrutinize what it produces.
It also matters whether people understand roughly how the tool reached its answer. Without that, you can't predict where it's likely to be wrong, so you either check everything with equal effort, which nobody keeps up, or check nothing.
It can stop junior lawyers from learning the job.
The work AI handles best (document review, first drafts, research memos) is the same work that used to teach junior lawyers their judgment. Take it away and in a few years you have lawyers supervising AI output without the experience to know when it's wrong.