Most law firms that struggle with AI adoption have a people problem, not a technology problem. The contract is signed, the platform is live, and users have been onboarded, but the usage data doesn’t lie.

The tool isn’t the issue. Getting people to actually use it is. What separates successful rollouts from shelf-ware is usually not the technology, it’s what happens in the weeks before anyone logs in for the first time.

Find Your Champion Before You Find Your Tool

Attorneys don’t change their habits because a vendor told them to. They change because a colleague they respect shows them a work product that would have taken twice as long without it. That’s the job of an internal champion.

Jonathan Cohen, Associate General Counsel at PNY Technologies, described it on Steno’s Between the Briefs podcast as finding someone who “actually believes in the depth and the substance of what you’re talking about at a philosophical or very high level.”

A champion can’t just be someone randomly assigned to learn the new tool’s features. It has to be someone who understands the potential, sees the new heights the firm could reach, and is passionate about actively shaping the team’s perspective. That genuine excitement is what makes them persuasive.

Your champion also has to be a peer. Attorneys are trained skeptics, and they apply that skepticism to change as readily as they apply it to opposing arguments. As Kyle Poe, a legal AI strategist who has advised firms on adoption, explains that a vendor demo or a slide deck from IT won’t convince them. What compels them is a colleague stating, in plain terms, that this changed how they work.

Start Small and Make It Visible

While it may seem like many attorneys are still against AI, what they’re really against is betting their reputation on something they aren’t certain will work. The way to address that is with evidence, not more pushing.

Firms should start by identifying a narrow, low-stakes use case where the risk is minimal and the output is easy to evaluate. Proving the concept in a contained way first does two things: it generates the early wins that build organizational confidence, and it creates more advocates who can speak to real results the way a champion does.

Once you have those early wins, make them visible. Power users should present to the team informally, at firm meetings or through Teams or Slack. This helps adoption spread organically. Some firms have gone further and created internal competitions to encourage use, tapping into attorneys’s competitive instincts while generating social proof from the inside.

Before broad launch, it’s worth thinking carefully about first impressions. Myah Bowermaster, Head of Legal Operations at Cvent, calls this strategic patience: the idea that rushing a half-baked rollout is worse than waiting until conditions are right.

Many attorneys will give new AI technology one chance—one prompt—and if that first experience goes poorly, they don’t return. Firms should use the time before launch to make sure people are set up for positive results before setting them loose with full access.

Train with Use Cases, Not Features

Feature walkthroughs tell people how a tool works. A use case library tells them when to reach for it. Knowing that AI can summarize a document is useful, but knowing it can cut hours of deposition review down to ten minutes catches people’s attention.

This reinforces the point that the real challenge isn’t technological. Ashley Gibbs has spent years in legal technology implementation and has found that “the greatest hurdle is breaking into people’s current habits and processes.” A use case library does that in a way a feature walkthrough can’t. It meets attorneys where they already are and shows them where the tool fits into work they're already doing.

That library shouldn’t be built once and filed away. The firms that sustain adoption treat it as a living document, updated as power users discover new applications and share them with the team. If a pulse check a year after rollout shows the tool still isn’t consistently used, the use case library is usually the first place to look, and the selling process may need to start over from there.

Putting It Into Practice

Each of the pieces outlined above works better when they’re connected. Pulling them together into an integrated plan might look something like this:

1. Identify your AI champion
2. Train people to prompt before launch
3. Start with one narrow, low-stakes use case
4. Run live demos on actual work product
5. Share early wins visibly
6. Launch an internal competition to surface power users
7. Build your use case library
8. Set a one-year check-in

Buy-in doesn’t come with the contract. It gets built conversation by conversation, win by win, until using the tool feels less like a change and more like the way things are supposed to work around here. Law firms that approach AI adoption deliberately will be the ones still using their tools a year from now.

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