April 29, 2026
The next stop on this year’s Resolution for the Legal Profession train is thinking about how to put AI into practice.
As underscored throughout this series, AI is not coming for our jobs, but it is coming for many of our tasks. While most of us, over time, have already seen technology fundamentally change the way we practice law (e.g., once ubiquitous tasks like document review, legal research and Shepardizing by book, etc.), AI is like technology on steroids in the transformative change it is bringing to the practice of law.
This can be a good thing for all concerned if we play our cards right, enabling us to focus on the enduring value that good lawyers will always deliver while making our services more affordable and accessible to many more people who need our help and can’t get it today.
Where to Start?
It is easy to get overwhelmed by the seemingly endless references to AI every day, but if we cut through the noise and keep our ethical responsibilities front and center, there are a number of practical ways AI can make our work as lawyers more efficient, accessible, and effective.
To make that a reality, there has been a method to the madness in the ordering of this resolution series, and the January, February, and March posts are the precursors to this one. Before we think about how we can use AI to improve our practices, we need to understand what our clients want and need and how our unique and enduring value as lawyers can help them achieve their goals. And to be set up for success, we need to make sure our minds and our practices are not clouded by the billable hour.
Once we have checked off those boxes, we should look at AI as we would any other technological or process improvement in our practice. That starts with mapping the key processes in your practice.
Make Process Mapping Your Friend
There are two kinds of process mapping that will help identify pain points and opportunities for improved efficiency: mapping your client’s journey and mapping out the case flow and steps involved for each of the core case types you handle in your practice.
The three links in the prior paragraph give a good overview of how process mapping works. It takes some practice to do this well, but by breaking down the work into the individual steps and tasks involved, there are many benefits to any legal practice before even considering where AI fits in. It is invaluable for understanding both your overall business operations as well as the flow of your core case types, helping to identify where the unique value you bring as a lawyer is most critical for achieving the client’s goals (and by extension when limited scope representation is a realistic option for the client), where you can effectively use other solutions, and how to think about your pricing strategy.
For AI specifically, process mapping helps identify where it can automate or enhance the core tasks in your practice. This recent column on the Attorney at Work blog provides some good food for thought in identifying the many areas of opportunity.
Familiarize Yourself with the AI Basics
If you are not already savvy with the basics of using AI, before moving forward you should experiment with it on lower-stakes issues in your life to get familiar with how the different systems work, how to use them, and how they can be helpful. Axios has published some good practical tutorials to learn about how to use AI that are a good place to start if you are not as familiar with how it works. Their “AI Cheat Sheet,” “Prompt like a Pro,” and “Make AI remember you” posts are three particularly good ones to check out.
For the practice of law more specifically, Mark Palmer and the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism are a good resource for learning some of the basics of how you can use it effectively.
Keep Your Ethical Responsibilities Front and Center
The headlines about lawyers getting into trouble for citing nonexistent cases produced by AI hallucinations can make AI sound more ethically fraught than it is, but they do underscore that it is a supportive tool for your practice and not a replacement for your legal judgment.
A recent post from the National Center for State Courts framed it well:
“Artificial intelligence can strengthen legal work. It can help draft documents. It can summarize large files. It can surface patterns quickly. But lawyers and courts remain responsible for the final product.
The Illinois Supreme Court last year adopted an AI policy encouraging its use with proper guardrails, and building on that policy, the Illinois Attorney Registration & Disciplinary Commission (ARDC) developed a more comprehensive guide for Illinois attorneys implementing AI.
The bottom line is so long as we keep using it with our core ethical responsibilities top of mind (which we always need to remember includes the duty of technological competence), AI is an important tool in our toolbox for serving clients.
Evaluate How You Can Streamline and Enhance Your Work with AI
Now you are ready to look at the many ways AI might streamline and enhance your practice. Whether in legal aid, private practice, or government, there is a lot of potential for making our services more efficient, accessible, and effective for everyday people or small businesses.
While the use cases will vary a bit depending on your particular practice area, we can learn a lot from the lawyers who have been trailblazers in this area. I point you to the wisdom of Lauren Lester and Mathew Kerbis as two good examples, and this
recent article about the ways firms are using AI today offers good food for thought.
Starting small is always a good first step—maybe automating an internal process that does not involve any confidential information. Then you can build from there, with more advanced users already using AI to build and train virtual assistants for their firms.
Pricing and Value
If you are already in a legal aid, government, in-house corporate, or contingent fee practice, you can skip this part as it does not apply. As I said earlier in this series, it is no coincidence that the areas where we are seeing the highest use of AI so far are corporate law departments, personal injury practices, and legal aid. The common denominator of those three lawyer groups is that none of them bill by the hour and they have every incentive to work as efficiently as possible.
For others, though, we’ve talked about why the billable hour does not fit the new AI reality (if it ever did before), but that begs the question of how we should price our services to better reflect our enduring value as lawyers.
As a starting point, the Illinois Supreme Court has made it clear that alternative fee arrangements are ethical and encouraged, both in Rule 1.5 of the Supreme Court Rules of Professional Conduct (fees) and Rule 300 of the Supreme Court Rules (fee petitions).
To build those principles into your practice, there are some good resources that can help you find the right approaches for your circumstances. And while there is no need to reinvent the wheel here, there is plenty of room for flexibility and innovation.
For the second time in this post, I commend to you Lauren Lester and Matthew Kerbis, and the new platform Mathew launched for subscription fee practices called Practi. While there are modest fees to get full access to Lauren and Mathew’s wisdom on running a successful modern law practice, those small investments can really help you jumpstart your pricing strategy. One of Lauren’s recent posts is particularly helpful in thinking about getting started.
Furthermore, Jordan Furlong’s recent thought-provoking posts (part one and part two) about our profession’s new value proposition and new pricing models that support it are another good resource. In the second part, he gives several practical examples of value-based pricing for different types of cases.
Onward to the Last Prong of this Year’s Resolution Series
It is a lot to think about, I know, but if we break the AI journey into these more manageable steps and learn from the trailblazers using AI as a force for good in the practice of law, we got this.
Even when we have this nailed in our own practices, however, there is one more collective step needed on the AI front: giving our clients and the broader public reliable and vetted AI tools to find appropriate help for their legal issues. That is the last stop in this year’s Resolution for the Legal Profession series, and stay tuned for more on that in May.