How to Pick Legal AI Your Team Will Actually Use

I spend a lot of my time at Lerner & Rowe thinking about process. I’ve seen what a good workflow does for a team, and I’ve seen what a bad one costs. Get it right, and people do their best work without fighting the system to do it. Get it wrong, and you lose your most capable people to friction they never signed up for.

When other firms ask me how to evaluate legal AI, the first thing I do is redirect the question. They usually ask what the tool can do. I think the better question is whether it fits how your team already works, because if your people have to work around it, that’s just moving the work somewhere else. It’s not saving anyone time.

The Real Test of Legal AI Is How Your Team Uses It

I’ve watched a lot of promising tools die on the vine over the years. The tool worked fine on its own terms. The problem was that using it meant changing how everyone already did their job: a new login, a new tab, a new step wedged between a person and the work they were already good at. Ask a team to bend around a tool long enough, and eventually they quietly go back to what they knew.

That’s the failure mode nobody puts in a demo. A platform can be genuinely capable and still fail, because adopting it asked your best people to give up workflows they’d already made efficient on their own.

Fit matters more than features for exactly this reason. The strongest tool in the world returns nothing if it sits outside how your team actually operates. The right one meets people where they already are. It shows up in the documents they’re already drafting and the case files they’re already managing, and it takes friction out of that path instead of building a new one alongside it.

Get the Most Out of Your People by Getting the Friction Out of Their Day

I think the job of leadership comes down to one thing: understand each person’s strengths, and put them where they’re most effective. That’s easy to say and hard to do when your team is spending its hours on work that has nothing to do with their judgment.

Every firm has people whose talent is being spent on the wrong things. A skilled paralegal buried in records retrieval. A sharp associate reformatting documents that should have arrived formatted. Everyone involved knows it, and the work still gets done, but it comes at the cost of the work only that person can actually do.

The right platform changes that math. When the repetitive, standardizable parts of a workflow are handled inside the system your team already uses, your people get their judgment back. The paralegal moves from chasing records to reviewing them. The associate moves from formatting to strategy. Nobody gets replaced. They just get freed up to do the part of the job that actually needed them in the first place.

That’s what “getting the most out of your team” means to me. It’s about spending the hours you already have better, not squeezing in more of them.

Why We Chose a Platform That Integrates Instead of One That Interrupts

When Lerner & Rowe evaluated AI, integration was the deciding factor, full stop. We wanted something that worked inside the flow of a case, from intake through resolution, so that using it felt like part of the work rather than a task bolted onto it.

That’s what we got with EvenUp, and the results showed up where they matter: we accelerated our settlements by roughly three months. That number came from removing friction that used to sit between steps, so cases kept moving instead of waiting.

Here’s the lesson I’d pass to any firm leader evaluating these tools: judge them on where they live, not just what they claim to do. A platform that integrates into your existing workflow makes your team’s life easier from day one. A platform that sits outside it asks your team to trust that the payoff comes later, after their life gets harder first. In my experience, that trust runs out before the payoff ever shows up.

What to Look for When You Evaluate

If you take one thing from this, take a checklist for the next tool you assess:

• Does it work where your team already works, or does it add another place they have to go? 
• Does it remove steps from the existing process, or add a parallel one? 
• Can you see how it reaches its output, so your team trusts it enough to rely on it?

The tools that pass those questions are the ones that get adopted, and a tool that gets adopted is the only kind that ever pays off. Everything else is just expensive software sitting on a shelf.

Good process disappears into the work and lets your team do what they do best, instead of fighting them for attention. That’s the standard I hold any tool to, and it’s the one I’d encourage every firm leader to hold too.

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Richard Hutchison has been an attorney with Lerner & Rowe since 2010 and serves as Managing Attorney in Arizona and Tennessee.