“If you want to understand a system, you have to understand the people who operate it.” — W. Edwards Deming
Imagine this: a highly skilled lawyer is on his way to court, late again for an important hearing. But instead of driving a car he’s riding an expensive, firm-issued bike. Despite pedaling fast, he can’t seem to keep his balance for very long. No matter how hard he pedals he can’t seem to go any faster.
The problem? It’s not the bike. The problem is that no one taught him how to ride it.
Now imagine that the firm hands him a sleek, state-of-the-art racing bike— exponentially more efficient, built for speed, and has the potential to transform his ride entirely. After attending a few trainings he sometimes gets there faster, but the results are sporadic. He keeps defaulting to the same poor riding style he used previously and can’t find the time to learn the right way. He’s too busy wobbling to and from court.
This fictional scenario paints a picture of the future that is all too real: The success of AI tools will be determined by how much we invest in the human element.
The Overlooked Human Factor in AI Adoption
Despite AI adoption in law firms rising from 19% in 2023 to 79% in 2024, fewer than 10% of firms have achieved universal implementation. The allure of AI’s efficiency and capabilities have the potential to outshine what has been, historically, one of the industry’s flattest tires: the failure to invest in resources geared toward developing the inherent human challenges that impact performance.
This includes essential factors like behavioral adaptation, emotional intelligence, cognitive agility, a lawyer’s mindset, daily habits and routines, professional identity, and work culture, among many others. These human elements shape how effectively AI can be integrated into practice, influencing both individual performance and firm-wide success.
In short: the primary barriers to successful AI integration aren’t technological. They are human. The integration of AI presents a golden opportunity for firms to prioritize the development of human skills in parallel with investments in technology.
It’s time to hit the breaks, pull over, and teach lawyers how to ride.
Understanding Human Barriers to Adoption
Getting the most out of technology isn’t just about choosing the right tool. It’s about changing long-standing habits and well-ingrained ways of thinking that stand in the way of utilizing a tool to its fullest, in the context of a lawyer’s workday.
Think about the last time you tried to make even a slight change to something thats been a core part of your workday or workflow for years. It’s almost always much more complicated than we imagine.
As a result, traditional change management efforts that cover technical aspects and practical application, without more, will not be enough in the age of AI. These approaches are unquestionably a necessary aspect, but often are not designed to address the deeper psychological, emotional, and cultural elements at play.
There are all sorts of innate barriers that are responsible for these challenges, but here are a few of the most common.
Cognitive Biases Override Evidence
Our minds actively resist change by systematically filtering reality through our well-established beliefs—thanks to a powerful psychological force known as confirmation bias. In practice, for example, a senior associate might dismiss an AI contract review tool after it misses a few clauses they caught manually, despite identifying a critical issue the associate overlooked. The focus is on the miss, and not the totality of the output.
The Power of Ingrained Behaviors
Our preference for the status quo and the familiar make even the most beneficial changes to our workday uncomfortable. Associates, for example, who have meticulously developed manual research workflows will likely experience genuine discomfort when confronted with more efficient AI-based alternatives–not because the alternatives are inferior, but because change itself causes a natural resistance. Resistance eventually leads to justification of comfortable but inefficient processes and the reinforcement of old habits, making it even harder to implement innovation at scale.
Firms Struggle to Embrace Change
The pressure to bill hours, meet tight deadlines, and produce error-free work creates a culture of risk aversion. From day one, new lawyers learn that recreating the wheel poses more risk than reward. And since time-saving tools can reduce billable hours, lawyers are often hesitant to adopt them.
In many of these situations, lawyers aren’t resisting change intentionally—they’re responding to deeply seeded professional norms and systemic pressures that shape their behavior.
Why People Development Must Precede Technology Deployment
These barriers aren’t merely anecdotal inconveniences—they’re fundamental blockers that impact the bottom line and detract from a firm’s competitive advantage. They must be addressed if firms want wide-scale technology investments to yield meaningful returns while supporting the development and longevity of their talent.
The Knowledge Worker’s Dilemma
Law firm environments create numerous trigger points that reinforce old habits. Email notifications, client calls, and meeting schedules constantly interrupt focused work, making it difficult to invest in building new habits for new systems. Under these conditions, lawyers naturally revert to familiar processes, regardless of their efficiency.
To complicate things even further, law firms lack a traditional “org chart” structure. Lawyers often juggle assignments from multiple partners who do not coordinate with one another. For many, no one serves as their true “boss” in the conventional sense—there’s no single person responsible for ensuring their success or monitoring their development. This ambiguity, coupled with the pressure to bill more hours creates a perfect storm where innovation becomes someone else’s problem and skill development takes a permanent backseat to client demands.
The “Saved Time” Problem
The increase in adoption of new time saving tools across firms raises an important question: are lawyers prepared to actually capture this new time, and if they can, what will they do with it? Without deliberate planning, newfound availability quickly disappears. Lawyers with underdeveloped routines and poor workday habits will likely fill the freed time with the same low-value activities that are currently the root of inefficiency today – the very same inefficiencies AI was meant to eliminate.
Some professionals predict AI has the potential to “save” 12 hours per week by 2029, about 200 hours annually. However, while 82% of professionals recognize the benefits of generative AI, 36% fail to notice the saved time immediately. Law firms that fail to prepare their lawyers properly on how to bridge this gap will be leaving millions in revenue on the table.
Coaching Outperforms Traditional Training
What can firms do to account for these types of human-centered development challenges? Traditional training programs are effective at delivering foundational knowledge, but often leave lawyers to apply what they’ve just learned independently. Research indicates that skill decay – the gradual loss of learned skills if not practiced and reinforced–can approach 70% within 24 hours and 90% within a week without reinforcement.
Coaching, however, brings structure, accountability, and targeted guidance that helps professionals retain what they learn. Unlike one-time training sessions, coaching provides continuous reinforcement and an opportunity to grapple with challenges under the guidance of a skilled professional, ensuring that new skills are practiced, refined, and eventually become second nature.
In essence, coaching is a partnership focused on unlocking potential and driving sustained improvement through personalized support and ongoing development.
Studies suggest habit formation takes roughly 66 days of consistent practice. Coaching and cohort-based methods integrate everyday tasks with feedback loops and self-reflection, normalizing trial and error. This structured approach helps professionals build not just skill but confidence in new tools, reducing resistance and increasing long-term adoption rates.
The Cost of Overlooking Human Readiness: The Email Paradox
Email provides a cautionary tale about technology adoption without a concerted, human-centered strategy. Initially celebrated as a productivity breakthrough, email eventually blurred work-life boundaries and created expectations of constant availability. Without deliberate procedures and intentional training, a tool designed to save time ultimately introduced massive inefficiencies into our workdays.
One study found that unmanaged email adoption contributed to a 27% increase in after-hours work between 2000-2010, with corresponding increases in burnout and attrition rates (ABA Journal of Legal Technology, 2020). The same risks apply to AI—if firms fail to define boundaries and best practices, AI-driven workflows could unintentionally introduce new inefficiencies and work pressures, or worse yet amplify existing ones.
To avoid repeating the email paradox with AI, law firms must prepare their people before deploying new technologies. Successful firms will recognize human readiness as a competitive advantage that will exponentially impact not efficiency but also recruitment and retention.
Four Ways Firms Can Prepare Their Lawyers for AI Integration
Recognizing the challenges AI adoption presents, firms must take proactive steps to ensure their lawyers are equipped not only with the tools but also with the mindset and self-awareness needed to integrate AI effectively.
Implement Structured Coaching Programs & Safe Spaces for Experimentation
Firms should establish ongoing coaching relationships for lawyers at all levels, including cohort coaching opportunities. Unlike traditional training, coaching sessions should occur regularly over weeks and months, focusing on practical application, overcoming specific barriers, and celebrating incremental wins.
Firms must also deliberately carve out protected time and psychological safety for lawyers to experiment with AI tools without fear of criticism. This could include guided “exploration hours” where attorneys test AI applications on non-client matters, structured workflow design sessions to integrate AI into daily routines, or habit-building exercises that reinforce consistent AI usage in practice.
Coach Lawyers to Develop Cognitive Agility and Workflow Design
Firms could provide personalized coaching that develops lawyers’ cognitive agility—the mental flexibility to switch between different thinking modes, tools, and approaches. This cognitive skill enables lawyers to move fluidly between traditional methods and AI-enhanced processes without experiencing the mental friction that typically accompanies context-switching.
Coaches help lawyers analyze their unique daily routines, recognize natural transition points, and design personalized integration approaches that leverage this newfound flexibility. This coach-guided development teaches lawyers to identify trigger points in their existing processes—such as the beginning of document drafting, after client intake meetings, or during review cycles—where AI tools could naturally enhance their workflow.
Establish Intentional Time Allocation Systems
Before introducing AI tools, firms should implement frameworks that help lawyers deliberately reallocate time saved through automation. This proactive approach prevents the common pattern where efficiency gains simply disappear into existing work patterns.
By establishing clear protocols for reinvesting saved time into higher-value activities—like deeper client relationships, strategic thinking, or professional development—firms ensure technology delivers meaningful improvements rather than just accelerating the pace of routine work.
Develop Emotional Intelligence Training Programs
Firms should invest in emotional intelligence training specifically tailored to technology adoption challenges. These programs would help lawyers recognize and manage their emotional responses to technological change—including anxiety, frustration, and resistance. By teaching lawyers to identify their own emotional barriers to AI adoption and providing strategies to work through them, firms create a psychological foundation for successful integration.
Such training might include mindfulness practices to manage technology-induced stress, exercises for reframing negative beliefs about AI, and communication tools for expressing concerns constructively rather than defaulting to rejection.
Conclusion
The firms that will thrive in the AI era won’t be those that merely purchase the most advanced tools, but those that invest equally in developing the human capabilities that technology can never replace. By addressing cognitive biases, rewiring habit patterns, creating supportive environments for experimentation, and deliberately planning how to use time saved through automation, they’ll transform AI from an efficiency tool into a catalyst for meaningful professional growth.
The future of legal practice depends not on choosing between human expertise and artificial intelligence, but on thoughtfully integrating both—and that integration begins with understanding and developing the people who will use the technology, not just the technology itself.
