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74 APRIL HEIMERL April Heimerl is a Manager within Epiq Advisory, where she leads digital workspace design for global law firms. She specializes in governance and AI-enabled knowledge access strategies, helping legal teams work more efficiently and find critical information faster. April partners closely with firm leadership, IT, and knowledge management teams to design secure, scalable, and user-centered digital experiences that support the evolving practice of law. With deep expertise in Microsoft 365 and legal workflows, she advises firms on using technology to improve lawyer efficiency, reducing friction in information discovery, and supporting the practical adoption of AI in real-world legal workflows WHAT LAW FIRMS CAN DO NOW You do not need to wait for fully autonomous AI; firms can start preparing now by enhancing the existing digi- tal workspace to become agent ready. 1. Elevate the digital workspace into a source-of-truth layer. • Decide what content is authoritative and what is not • Assign ownership and review cycles for key content types. • Reduce duplication and eliminate stale material • Implement consistent metadata. 2. Embed governance into the workspace itself. • Make permission-aware access, matter security, and audit-friendly lifecycle controls part of the everyday experience. • Ensure that when AI operates, it does so within those boundaries. 3. Pick one workflow and redesign it for human plus AI collaboration. • Don't just "drop AI in." Start with the workflow: intake, NDAs, matter opening, research memos -- pick something concrete. • Map the steps. Identify where AI can draft, assemble, summarize, or route work. • Design the process so AI does the heavy lifting while humans review, approve, and escalate. 4. Create an AI operating model. • Define who owns AI governance, quality, and risk. • Establish how new use cases are evaluated, tested, and rolled out. • Build feedback loops so lawyers can report issues, suggest improvements, and see changes over time. This is not about spinning up the most pilots or ex- perimenting with the shiniest tools. It is about build- ing foundations that make autonomy safe, trusted, and valuable. Once those foundations are in place, the 'check engine' light turns off as AI moves from isolated experiments to a reliable part of how work gets done.

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