It's difficult to get a room full of lawyers to agree on anything. It's remarkable, then, that in a recent study, 94 percent of leaders from nearly 400 different law firms agreed on one premise — that law firms' current focus on efficiency will be a permanent feature of law firm life going forward.

The agreement on that point among the managing partners and law firm chairs surveyed in the latest Altman Weil “Law Firms in Transition” report suggests that they have overwhelmingly bought into — or at least accepted — the need to make themselves more efficient. The data, however, tells a more nuanced story.

Partners may acknowledge the existence of competitive pressures to become more efficient, but they have not acted on opportunities consistent with that near-universal view. Specifically, the Altman Weil study revealed that law firms as a whole have not leveraged the AI-powered tools that carry the greatest potential for efficiency improvements. Ironically, it also found that often, the very partners who agree on the need for efficiency — like that which can be achieved through artificial intelligence (AI) — are viewed as a major obstacle to achieving it, a theme we saw repeated in Casetext's own recent research. Sixty-five percent of attorneys surveyed by Altman Weil cited partners' resistance to change as the reason their firm is not doing more to change how it delivers legal services.

Taken together, the above suggests that the law firms that will be most competitive going forward are those able to introduce artificially intelligent, efficiency-enhancing tools without their partners even noticing.

The Promise of Knowledge Management

Since the Great Recession a decade ago, law firms have taken concerted action to operate more efficiently. They have, for instance, outsourced work and opened remote offices dedicated to back-office functions. These efforts have enjoyed varying degrees of success. There is one tactic, however, that many view as the holy grail of operational efficiency within law firms: powerful knowledge management systems.

Knowledge management broadly refers to the process of collecting the information that an organization and its members possess and making it accessible to everyone in the organization. Community file cabinets are an example of a crude knowledge management system. The arrival of the digital age, of course, has expanded the potential for KM tools to revolutionize business practices within law firms, which are historically inefficient workplaces.

Casetext works with knowledge management leaders at firms all across the country. Realizing that they have gained unique insight into modern law firm operations, we conducted a study on the future of knowledge management in the law. (You can find the full report here.) Two insights from that study, in particular, speak to divide between law firms' words and actions on efficiency.

Employing AI in Knowledge Management

The first insight in the report is that nearly every KM professional we spoke with agreed that effective KM would involve an AI component. As Rich McClain, the chief information officer of Hunton & Williams, explained to us: “The explosion of information exceeds a 'human-centric' way of managing it.”

While KM professionals recognize how vital AI will be to their knowledge management efforts, many firms are not quite there yet. In fact, the Altman Weil survey revealed that only 7.5 percent of firms are using AI-powered tools, and only 29 percent are researching options. A much larger percent, 38 percent, expressed familiarity with AI, but said that they hadn't taken any steps toward making use of it yet.

We expect these numbers to improve in the coming months and years, as a response to two different trends. First, more firms are waking up to the potential of knowledge management, which in turn will lead them to AI-driven services. Second, as they continue to evolve, AI-powered KM tools will become more powerful, more ubiquitous, and less expensive.

Making AI Partner-Proof

The second insight we gleaned from KM professionals is that KM services are doomed to failure if they put the onus on attorneys to maintain them. Patrick Dundas, a knowledge management associate at Schulte Roth & Zabel, put his finger directly on the problem.

“No one went to law school to learn to fill in a database,” he said. “The 'bad data' problem undercuts the utility of every system.”

At least one finding from the Altman Weil survey seems to confirm this view. Asked why their firm isn't doing more to change its delivery of legal services, including becoming more efficient, the top answer was: “Partners resist most change efforts.” Ultimately, you could get 100 percent of partners to agree that efficiency is important, but it still won't get them to change the way they operate.

The answer lies in “partner-proofing” KM: making it so partners need not do any work whatsoever to maintain the knowledge database, but rather all the work is done by artificial intelligence, working in the background. The ideal KM tool, Gina Lynch of Paul Weiss told us, is one that works seamlessly behind an attorneys' existing workflow to extract necessary information. With such a system, the attorney can focus exclusively on their clients, without having to remember to record anything for KM purposes.

Jake Heller is the co-founder and CEO of Casetext. Before starting Casetext, Jake was a litigator at Ropes & Gray. He's a Silicon Valley native, and has been programming since childhood. For more information about CARA, Casetext's AI-backed legal research assistant, visit info.casetext.com/cara-ai.