As GenAI becomes unavoidable in legal work, law firms and clients are colliding over how — and whether — its promised efficiency gains should translate into measurable savings and shared value
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Client expectations around AI have shifted from curiosity to accountability — Law firms are now being asked not just whether they use GenAI, but to prove how it delivers measurable cost savings on specific matters — a question most firms still cannot answer with hard data.
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A growing contradiction defines firm/client relationships — As clients simultaneously demand AI adoption, require granular billing transparency, and in some cases refuse to pay for work performed with AI, they’re creating a pricing and value paradox with no clear resolution for their law firms.
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The ROI challenge around AI is fundamentally a relationship problem — Driven by a widening gap between what clients expect to save and what firms can demonstrate, a rift has developed between clients and firms, which is compounded by the fact that few firms have a coherent GenAI strategy in place.
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NEW YORK — Legalweek 2026 opened with a keynote conversation featuring Mindy Kaling, the Emmy-nominated writer, producer, and Tony Award-winning playwright, who reflected on a career built around one enduring fascination: messy relationships. She talked about growing up wanting to write something like Sex and the City, only to end up helping to chronicle the internal politics of a Scranton, Pennsylvania paper company in The Office. She talked about her love of watching people navigate breakups and power struggles and then finding the comedy in it all.
If she’s looking for new material, the three standing-room-only panels that followed could keep her busy for seasons.
Not surprisingly, the relationship between clients and their law firms has always been complicated — bound by mutual need but strained by competing incentives. Now, that tension is starting to reach a rolling boil as many law firms can’t seem to agree on exactly how the gains of their use of AI tools, especially generative AI (GenAI), are going to be split, or even if they’re going to be split at all.
AI is no longer optional or experimental — and many clients simply assume it’s already in use.
Across three Thomson Reuters-sponsored sessions during this week’s Legalweek event, that tension surfaced again and again — not as a future concern, but as a present reality. Today, clients are arriving at the table more informed, more demanding, and more willing to use AI themselves. Firms are investing heavily in AI, but they still are struggling to quantify returns in terms their clients will accept. With the rates that law firms charge increasing — averaging more than 7% growth in 2025, and likely to stay on that pace in 2026 — it sets up a collision with savings mandates that have yet to produce a shared framework for measurement. And underneath all of it, a fault line is building pressure — one that, as Ellen Hudock, GSK’s Chief of Staff Legal and Compliance, is not being resolved.
In 2026, GenAI has become the thing neither side can stop talking about, the thing both sides agree matters, and the thing that neither side can agree on how to handle.
This is not the story of an industry resisting change. Nearly everyone at Legalweek agreed that AI adoption is no longer optional. The harder questions, however, and the ones that echoed through every panel, every audience comment, and every hallway conversation is who benefits, how much, and who gets to decide.
Proving AI’s path to saving clients money
Three years ago, the client question was simple: Are you using AI, and would you use it on our matters? In 2026, that question has matured, and the new version is much harder to answer.
GSK’s Hudock described the shift bluntly during one panel. GSK is learning as much as it can from its outside law firms about how they’re deploying GenAI, she said, and are always looking to partner on new use cases. However, she noted that the conversation has moved well past curiosity. The pressure to deliver savings — internally and externally — is intense, and the questions have sharpened accordingly: What are you using? How are you using it? How does it generate savings?
Clearly, firms are hearing this message. Matthew Beekhuizen, Chief Pricing and Innovation Officer at Greenberg Traurig, noted that the pace of AI-driven change has accelerated sharply, particularly since October 2025. Clients who had previously said nothing about AI are now asking how it’s being used on their specific legal matters.
Indeed, AI is no longer optional or experimental — and many clients simply assume it’s already in use, said Mark Brennan, a partner at Hogan Lovells.
The trouble is that firms still can’t give clients the answer they most want to hear. When pressed on how much cost savings AI is actually achieving, the response from the firm side is often: We’re still gathering the data. Mitchell Kaplan, Managing Director of Zarwin Baum, acknowledged the industry is still in the anecdotal phase of measuring returns.
Sergey Polak, Director of Technology Innovation at Ropes & Gray, described the current state of ROI measurement as being based more on conventional wisdom rather than hard evidence. Hudock’s response to this was pointed: That’s exactly the situation in which clients want to partner. Supply the work, and let’s figure it out together.
The contradictions in the room
If the evolution in client expectations were the whole story, it would be manageable; however, the reality is messier than that, because clients are not speaking with one voice.
During another panel, Barclay Blair, Senior Managing Director of AI Innovation at DLA Piper, laid out the contradictions in sharp relief. Blair, who introduced himself as “the extremist on the panel,” is seeing clients who expect AI to be used and are asking how it will achieve specific savings targets. At the same time, many law firms are still receiving directives that feel lifted out of 2023, such as demands for warrants that models are unbiased, and declarations that firms cannot use AI without explicit permission. In 2026, both postures are arriving in the same inbox.
When pressed on how much cost savings AI is actually achieving, the response from the firm side is often: We’re still gathering the data.
The billing conversation captures this tension perfectly. Polak of Ropes & Gray noted that clients are beginning to ask for line-item transparency on invoices — was AI used on this task, and how much time or money did it save? Simultaneously, as Blair observed, other clients are issuing guidelines stating they won’t pay for certain services if performed by AI. This isn’t clients barring AI outright; rather, its clients demanding firms adopt AI, then using that very adoption as leverage to negotiate a decrease in costs. Not surprisingly, this becomes a self-reinforcing cycle with no obvious exit — at least, not for law firms.
Meanwhile, Zarwin Baum’s Kaplan raised a billing paradox that GenAI is making harder to ignore. As AI compresses work that once took hours into minutes, an itemized hourly bill increasingly tells a story that undersells the value delivered. His proposed answer: a return to the single line-item services rendered bill, which actually predated the billable hour. Kaplan then asked whether clients would actually accept it.
The advice to the law firms in the room from DLA Piper’s Blair was more blunt: Don’t wait for the client to set the terms. Lead the conversation about AI ROI and set the meeting. As Blair described, this is now the time to negotiate how value gets shared, while both sides are still figuring out the rules — not after one side has already written them.
The pressure hasn’t yet found a release valve
None of these tensions exist in isolation. They are symptoms of a structural mismatch between what clients need from the economics of legal AI and what firms are currently able to demonstrate — and the numbers suggest the legal industry is less prepared for this conversation than it thinks.
As Thomson Reuters’ Steven Petrie pointed out, those law firms with a GenAI strategy are 3.9-times more likely to achieve ROI than those without one. Yet, only 22% of firms have such a strategy, Petrie said. That gap — between the firms that are thinking systematically about AI’s role in their business and those that aren’t — may turn out to matter less than the gap between what clients expect to save and what firms can show they’ve delivered.
The ROI question, in other words, is not just a measurement challenge, rather it’s a relationship challenge. And like all the best relationship drama, the tension doesn’t come from disagreement about whether the relationship matters. It comes from both sides wanting something slightly different from it — and neither being quite sure if both sides can get what they want.
If Mindy Kaling is still looking for complicated relationships to write about, she knows where to find them. This one’s going to need a few seasons to work itself out.
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