In a market transformed by AI and accelerating technological change, the fundamentals of legal excellence haven’t disappeared, but they are no longer enough.
In a recent Legal Innovation Forum webinar on AI as a client service superpower: Driving proactive legal work, we explored the challenges of meeting rising expectations for sophisticated relationship management and proactive counsel.
As our speakers noted, doing great legal work is table stakes, so leading lawyers are raising the bar by keeping much closer tabs on their clients and anticipating their needs.
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Today’s clients don’t just want answers when they ask for them; they want lawyers who anticipate risks, surface opportunities, and connect legal strategy to business outcomes before issues escalate. Responsiveness is still important—but insight and commercial awareness are essential for forward-thinking law firms.
“You’re not just providing a service anymore. You’re expected to know the client sector— not just the law,” said Jacqueline Dinsmore, managing partner at Canadian firm, Caravel Law. “You’re expected to know market trends. You’re expected to know AI impact, financing environments, geopolitical risk.”
Building relationships
As James Wang, co-founder at legal tech company Postilize, noted:
“The technology is not going to be what stands behind the client. It’s the person’s relationship, the ability to care and to provide that value to the business.”
As the legal landscape evolves, speed and urgency are more important than ever, together with clear and concise answers—not lengthy memos. Above all else, clients want to know that the lawyer they work with has their back. That’s what keeps the phone ringing.
Hyper Responsiveness
“We need to be incredibly hyper-responsive to our clients or they will leave, and they will not tell us,” said Rachel Merrick Maggs, VP, customer-led growth at Litera—a global legal technology leader.
“People buy and make buying choices emotionally and they justify it rationally, so at the end of the day, it’s the relationship that’s going to win—as long as you can back it up by proving that you can show the value,” she added.
“Now we have 40-to-50 percent of our clients that we actually survey in any given year. That’s really good, and it keeps going up every year”, said Mark Levin, chief marketing and business development officer at Chicago-based firm, Marshall Gerstein.
“Each time we start realizing that there’s a client that’s not happy that we can actually talk to before they leave.”
Staying ahead of the competition
As AI adoption allows organizations to handle more complex work in-house, firms have to go the extra mile to stand out.
“I think there’s going to be a premium on the things where the law firms really deliver value; the judgment, the counseling, the strategy, the risk management, the client relationships—and less on the commoditized work,” said Richard Robbins, director of applied AI at global firm Reed Smith.
Although many clients are asking about technology adoption and how it’s being used to deliver value in their RFPs, Robbins argues that they care less about the tech stack and more about the outcomes that tech delivers. Dinsmore noted that while some clients still bar the use of AI, many others are now demanding it.
Whether or not AI is being used in legal workflows, it is undeniably valuable in building stronger client relationships.
“We need to use technology to improve how we respond to clients. We have to start leading and not waiting,” said Dinsmore. “Clients aren’t expecting us to be reactive. If there’s a regulatory change, they want to see us using our technology to talk about that regulatory change in a proactive way.”
Wang referenced the “K-shaped” economy to describe how AI is reshaping legal work. As AI tools take on more routine, repeatable, and process-driven tasks, that lower-complexity work is being reduced in terms of value and pricing. At the same time, highly specialized, complex, and judgment-intensive work is commanding ever greater premiums. The result is a growing divide in legal services, with AI accelerating the split between commoditized tasks and expert advisory work.
oPPORTUNITIES FOR CREATIVITY
The rise of AI presents an opportunity for firms and ALSPs to become more creative in the way they structure billing, so being nimble with pricing is key to achieving market differentiation.
As Levin remarked: “I do pricing within my firm as well, and looking at these two-to-three year pricing deals makes you wonder. I don’t know what pricing looks like next month or next year, let alone three years from now.”
As technology continues to reshape the delivery of legal services, the true differentiator is no longer the quality of nuts-and-bolts legal work, but the ability to translate organizational and market knowledge into meaningful, forward-looking guidance. In a tech-driven legal market, the human edge lies in anticipating what matters most, strengthening trusted relationships, and delivering insight that helps businesses move confidently toward what’s next.
Stay tuned for the second blog-post in this two-part series to discover how leading firms are transforming client service with tech-driven insight.