WASHINGTON, DC — One panelist at the recent Thomson Reuters Institute’s 25th Annual Law Firm COO & CFO Forum described a session she’d run at her own firm. It started well enough, but then the group was asked what excited them about AI, and their answers were fed into a live word cloud. One word appeared, then kept growing, bigger and bigger, until it dominated the screen: Nothing.

The room laughed, but it was the nervous kind. It was the laugh of people who recognized the scene a little too closely.

It was a strange moment, because by most objective measures, firm leaders had more reason for optimism this year than last. The progress that AI is making inside law firms is real; however, it’s that the fear is just growing faster.

The progress is real

Start with what’s working, because a lot is. For example, those firms reporting real returns mostly aren’t chasing transformation. They’re picking off specific, measurable problems.

One firm leader pointed to time entry as an ideal target, with AI tools that helps attorneys recover time they’d forgotten to bill — a task lawyers hate with a passion, but one that comes with results anyone can measure. Another asked staff to name their biggest pain points and went after them one at a time. Indeed, one fix, for PDF extraction, turned out not to need AI at all. A third firm discovered its people were losing two to three hours a week just searching for things and targeted that, the firm leader said.

The wins aren’t only about saving time. One general counsel described receiving a short seller’s voluminous report and using AI to build rebuttal points overnight. In a crisis, speed is the value.

Even the junior associate — the industry’s most anxious subject — now has a more hopeful path forward. Some firm leaders at the Forum were seriously discussing using the time AI saves not to shrink their associate ranks but to accelerate them, turning juniors into more experienced, active attorneys in a fraction of the time the traditional path required. It’s still a minority view, but it exists now, and it’s gaining ground.

So is the fear

And yet the anxiety at the Forum was impossible to miss. One COO described AI as unique because it combines new technology with an existential threat to the profession. She also said plainly that AI fatigue is growing as is the backlash. Another panelist, an in-house lawyer, observed that the room’s mood dropped the moment her fellow panelist said AI.

The Forum wasn’t the first to air such worries. Indeed, the concerns now reach well beyond any single role. The sharpest version of that fear is landing on junior associates, but the unease now extends to the workforce as a whole, to who controls the technology, and to the costs that many communities are being asked to bear.

As a result, these concerns are being voiced more openly than they were even a few months ago.

The trust gap

Why would fear rise even as results improve? One COO, citing another speaker, offered the answer: Lack of trust breeds fear. Some of her colleagues have no anxiety about AI at all; others are deeply afraid. Her advice was to find a balance of opportunity that lets people feel empowered, and then to meet them where they are.

Part of the problem is that many leaders still see AI primarily as a cost-containment technology. One firm executive recalled her AI leader telling her the team needed to hire more than half a dozen people. Her response: “I thought this technology was supposed to be saving us money?”

It’s an understandable reaction, and it captures a mindset that was hard to miss at the Forum. However, it does cut two ways. First, the premise is shaky. As another panelist noted, these investments aren’t going to get any cheaper, and making AI work often takes more people before it takes fewer. Second, and more importantly, the people inside the firms can hear it. If leadership’s working assumption is that AI exists to cut costs, it’s not hard to guess what the people who make up those costs conclude.

That fear isn’t irrational — it just comes from paying attention.

Yet much of the advice to firm leadership for managing that fear amounted to working around it. One panelist urged leaders to follow the good energy and focus on enthusiasts rather than naysayers. Another, asked what to avoid in the coming week, advised against talking about AI too much. A third shared a commercial in which cavemen push a cart on square wheels and wave off someone offering a round one, because they’re too busy working.

Each of those ideas makes some sense on its own. Together, they offered to the same audience that had earlier laughed at a word cloud reading Nothing, a strategy of outpacing the skeptics rather than persuading them. All it requires is for leadership to smartly and wisely maneuver everyone through a divisive time. The odds on that might not be great.

Fortunately, the Forum also featured firms that were seeing better AI adoption doing the opposite. One CFO described asking their people which tasks they hated most and targeting those friction points. They also sat down with staff who feared their skills would dull, or that they were training their own replacements. One innovation leader found that having people passively shadow an AI user did nothing to change habits, while hands-on, participatory learning moved adoption meaningfully.

None of these approaches require ignoring anyone, but they do require listening first.

No choice

Near the end of one panel, a COO was asked what gave her confidence that the legal industry would successfully integrate AI. Her answer: “Because we don’t have a choice.”

A technology executive on the same panel framed the challenge differently: The hardest part isn’t the technology, he said, it’s bringing your people on the journey with it. That challenge isn’t unique to law firms, of course, and nearly every organization adopting AI faces it. Indeed, the Forum’s keynote speaker raised it in broader terms. Nothing about the technology, he argued, dictates whether it divides a workforce or strengthens it. That depends entirely on how it’s used.

Nor is it a new problem. Twenty-five years ago, when the Law Firm COO & CFO Forum first convened, the most advanced technology in a law firm was the BlackBerry clipped to a partner’s belt, and the firm library was still a place to which you walked. Since then, the industry has absorbed email, the internet, mobile devices, and the cloud, each arriving with its own predictions of doom.

None of those technologies asked permission, and none waited for firms to be ready. However, those firms that handled these shifts best tended to be the ones that let their people discover what the new tools were good for, rather than treating the tools as a way to replace those people.

The opportunity in front of firm leaders now may be the sharpest one yet. As another CFO put it, people won’t be buried in grunt work; they’ll be exercising judgment and making decisions — the kinds of things lawyers tend to actually enjoy doing. And getting there doesn’t require a bigger budget or a better model; rather, it requires leaders to get out of their own way, stop treating their people’s skepticism as an obstacle, and start treating it as a way to guide their firms towards a better future.

You can register now for next year’s 26th Annual Law Firm COO & CFO Forum on Oct. 20-21, 2027, in New York City here‍