Nov 13, 2026

AI’s Next Gains Are in Your Firm’s Operations

By Stephen Cole, Delivery Principal, Williams Lea

Most of the AI conversation in legal has centered on the practice of law: drafting, research and review. That is where the tools launched, where the pilots ran and where the adoption numbers have grown. It makes sense as the focus has been on attorney productivity. However, it is also only part of the story.

Every matter involves non-attorney work as well: intake, document processing, records, billing, and the services that move information between people, offices, and systems. That “operation layer” rarely comes up when firms talk about AI. At the roundtable of innovation leaders Williams Lea hosted at ILTACON, it came up last, after two hours focused on the practice of law. Mike Raposa wrote about that evening here.

At Williams Lea, I spend my days in the operational layer and believe it is where much of the unclaimed AI value sits for firms to realize.

Clients are already measuring

In the Thomson Reuters Future of Professionals Report 2026, 77 percent of clients say AI-enabled quality improvement from their firms is very important or essential. Between three and six percent say most or all of their firms are delivering it.

A lot of what clients experience as quality comes from operations: an invoice that is right the first time; a document that arrives in the correct format; a matter file anyone on the team can find and trust. When those steps remain manual, the AI gains for consistency and efficiency are lost before they reach the client.

Two kinds of governance

One issue from the roundtable needs addressing. Governance for the practice of law and governance for the business of law are different problems. The first deals with privilege, professional responsibility, and client confidentiality. The second looks like any enterprise data governance question: who owns the data, where does it live, and who has permissions.

Firms that treat them as one problem tend to hold operational work to the standard built for legal work, and the process stalls. Separating them lets the business side move at a business pace.

Where to start

If you are looking at your firm’s operational layer, three questions help:

Which processes touch the most matters? Billing, intake, and document handling usually top the list.
Where does work get re-keyed or reformatted between systems? Those handoffs are where automation pays back fastest.
Who owns the data at each step? If nobody can answer, start there.

McKinsey’s work on law firms argues that preeminence increasingly depends on platform infrastructure, with institutional knowledge moved out of document management systems and individual practitioners into structured, reusable assets. That infrastructure lives in the operational layer, and the firms that build it first will be able to show clients the quality improvement they demand.