What Real AI Adoption Looks Like

For Brian Kennedy, Director of Innovation, Real Estate, at BCLP – and who is one of many expert speakers appearing at Legal Innovators UK next week, November 4 + 5, in London – the most meaningful measure of adoption is whether AI has moved from an optional tool to part of the core workflow itself.

With 20 years’ experience across legal practice and innovation, Brian now leads innovation across BCLP’s global Real Estate practice, with a particular focus on moving AI from exploration to structured adoption at scale.

Ahead of Legal Innovators UK next week, where Brian will join ‘The Reality of Realignment‘, the events team spoke with him about AI-native workflows, measuring innovation, organisational culture and where real competitive advantage will come from.

And to pick up your free tickets, please follow the link below. Complimentary passes are for those working inside law firms and within corporate legal teams.

What does innovation mean specifically within a law firm, and how has the role of an innovation function changed in recent years?

Fundamentally, innovation is about finding new and better ways of delivering legal services that add value for the firm and its clients. That means bringing together the right people, the right processes, and the right technology that can act as a force multiplier. That’s always started with finding or building the right technology to solve a given problem, and then winning adoption for it.

But increasingly, innovation teams are expected to advise on far more than the tools themselves: upskilling, resourcing, and the firm’s value proposition in a market being reshaped by technology. And as AI touches the work lawyers do more fundamentally, change management and culture matter even more than before.

Generative AI has moved faster than almost anything we’ve dealt with, and because of the wider realignment it necessitates, it’s pulled in far more stakeholders than previous waves of legaltech. The conversations I have with lawyers now carry a different urgency, and conversations with stakeholders increasingly reach into decisions sitting above the tech itself – pointing to the firm’s direction more broadly. That’s made the innovation function a genuine strategic advisory capability.

How do you measure the success of an innovation project? Beyond financial return, what metrics do you consider?

You’ve got to match the metric to the mission. If the aim is to drive internal efficiency, time savings and how that plays into profitability are the obvious measures. For client-facing solutions, the better question is whether it’s improved the client experience. For everyday productivity tools that create lots of small gains, qualitative metrics (e.g. lawyer satisfaction, ease of use) may work best.

You may have an ideal worldview of how you’d like to measure success, but practical constraints may limit what you can actually capture. In those cases, you need to work with proxies and extrapolation rather than perfect data.

There’s also a bigger question over whether traditional ROI models are truly fit for purpose in the age of generative AI. Given a multi-purpose AI legal assistant can do thousands of tasks across multiple practice areas, trying to calculate an overall ROI measurement seems a bit like asking the ROI of having a computer, or access to the internet.

The real test of success, to me, isn’t a return figure. It’s whether an initiative is actually moving us closer to our strategic objectives as a firm.

How important is organisational culture to successful innovation? Can a law firm have the latest technology and still fail to become genuinely innovative?

Absolutely – the tech is only half the story. Often the mistake is treating innovation as a technology rollout when it’s really a change management exercise. The latter only succeeds with the right culture behind it: one that supports continuous exploration and experimentation, and gives lawyers the space to do that. You need discipline and prioritisation too, though, since you can’t chase every idea.

Mindset is an important part of the culture. Lawyers may understandably see innovation through the lens of how work is currently done, and look to technology to replicate that. What’s needed is the willingness to step back and reimagine workflows, so that, for example, they become AI-native.

None of this works unless the culture treats innovation as a shared responsibility – not something lawyers hand off to the innovation team or delegate to juniors. It has to be a shared endeavour: stakeholders and lawyers at every level working in partnership, so that solutions and ways of working actually land in practice.

Given how fast AI tools are changing, how realistic is it to expect a training or upskilling strategy to keep pace, and what does a credible approach actually look like?

Formal training is probably the layer most exposed to the pace of change. By the time you’ve built a programme around a particular tool, that tool may well have already moved on.

That means a credible model has to treat formal training as the foundation, not the whole structure. It needs to be supplemented by much faster informal channels: lawyers sharing what they learned that week, a quick show-and-tell, a win shared in a team meeting.

And one of the best sources of learning is what lawyers are discovering through their own exploration. Feed that straight back into the training, and it becomes less a once-a-year curriculum refresh and more a continuous learning loop.

As AI becomes embedded into mainstream legal workflows, will competitive advantage come from access to the technology or from knowing how to implement and use it effectively?

I’d actually argue that both of these things will become table stakes. Most firms, including many clients, will have access to similar AI platforms, and lawyers will certainly be expected to be proficient in using them and in knowing what tool to use when.

For me, the real competitive advantage will come from differentiation. If firms rely on the same off-the-shelf capabilities as everyone else, there’s less reason for clients not to simply insource that work themselves using the same AI tools. But if you tailor the AI output to reflect the firm’s judgment and preferred approaches, its unique tone and voice, and its proprietary know-how, its use of AI becomes a genuine point of differentiation against competitors.

The other lever is knowing where to point that effort. AI can theoretically touch almost every legal workflow, which I think of as trying to “eat an elephant” – the only way to do it is one piece at a time. Competitive advantage comes from deciding which piece to tackle first, and tying those choices to the firm’s wider commercial strategy.  For instance, creating new revenue-generating opportunities in growth areas, or supporting high-value strategic advisory work at the apex of the legal value pyramid. That way, AI optimisation and differentiation effort goes where it matters most.

Looking five years ahead, what will a genuinely technology-enabled law firm look like? Which aspects of practice change most?

A genuinely technology-enabled firm in five years won’t look like today’s firm with better tools bolted on. We’ve already touched on some of what that takes: workflows reimagined to be AI-native rather than digitised versions of the old process, a technology and AI strategy that answers directly to commercial strategy rather than sitting beside it, and a culture built to support those changes. It also reaches into how firms resource themselves, how they price their work, and how they define their value in a world fundamentally altered by AI. All of that has to move together, not as an afterthought tacked on to the technology.

To get there, firms will also need to have thought hard about the division of activity between human and AI. The aspects of practice that change most won’t necessarily be the ones you’d expect, based on how routine or complex a task looks on paper. It’s whether it calls on judgement, empathy and the ability to persuade, qualities that are genuinely hard for AI to replicate, and that clients value most in their lawyers. Get that distinction right, and AI frees up lawyers to spend more time on the parts of the job where they add the most value. And, paradoxically, that’s what makes the legal process feel more human, even as it becomes more digital.

What do you hope the audience takes away from the session at Legal Innovators UK?

I hope people leave with a clear understanding that the next phase of this work isn’t really about more pilots or proof of concepts. “The Reality of Realignment” is about driving genuine structural change: reimagining workflows and the wider process, not just adding a tool on top of how things were done before.

For me, the clearest sign of real progress is when AI becomes the primary delivery mechanism for a particular task or activity, rather than simply an available option sitting alongside how it was always done. At that point, the workflow itself looks fundamentally different. I expect the panel will bring its own examples of where we’re already seeing that, and I’m looking forward to hearing where others have got to.

At Legal Innovators UK, Brian will join ‘The Reality of Realignment‘ to explore where AI is already creating genuine structural change across law firms.

Join us at Legal Innovators UK on 4 – 5 November 2026 at The Minster Building, near the Tower of London.

To pick up your free tickets, please follow the link below. Complimentary passes are for those working inside law firms and within corporate legal teams.

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Interview: Emma Nguyen, Marketing Executive at Cosmonauts, Graphics: Charles Kabunga, Design Lead at Cosmonauts.