P2P

10 That is what makes this moment different from earlier waves of technology. Most legal technology improved coordination, storage, communication, or administration. AI changes the economics of intelligence. It lowers the cost of producing certain forms of analysis, synthesis, drafting, and structured reasoning. Judgment is still needed, and legal expertise is not flattened into a commodity, but the operating environment around it has changed. For decades, law firms have depended on scarce cognitive labor. The profession has been built on highly trained people spending time reading, interpreting, comparing, drafting, assessing risk, and constructing arguments. Pricing, leverage models, staffing patterns, and client expectations developed around that scarcity. When a key input to professional work becomes cheaper and more abundant, the implications extend beyond productivity. AI is challenging that equation. When intelligence costs fall, the competitive advantage shifts. Success depends less on individual professionals' brilliance and more on organizations' systems to deploy intelligence effectively. In an earlier essay, I described this dynamic as the "Moneyball effect" in law. When a critical input becomes cheaper and more abundant, advantage shifts to those who redesign their operating model around it. Yet a gap remains between The strongest firms will not just have the smartest lawyers, though that still matters. They will be the firms that design better systems for deploying intelligence in real workflows. They will know where AI helps, where it does not, where human review must remain constant, where supervision can be risk-based, and where institutional knowledge can improve speed and consistency without sacrificing quality. The gap between individual adoption and institutional capability matters. A firm can have many lawyers using AI weekly and remain at an early stage. A partner may use a consumer tool to summarize a document. An associate may use it to generate a first draft. A knowledge lawyer may pilot a product for a defined use case. All of that can happen while the institution lacks clear governance, reliable training, defensible workflows, curated knowledge infrastructure, and a way to measure if these efforts improve outcomes. individual adoption and institutional capability. 69% of legal professionals use generative AI tools in their individual work. Still, only 46% of firms report deploying general-purpose AI at an organizational level, and just 34% have implemented legal-specific AI systems. MORE AI RESOURCES ONLINE Browse Previous Issues for more AI resources. https://epubs.iltanet.org/p2p/ spring25 ó THE ILLUSION OF MATURITY 1

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