Extract from Jeremy Barker’s article “When Clients Ask About AI, How Should Firms Respond?”
Although today’s legal technology events, above all else, showcase the many ways AI is disrupting the industry, at least one speaker at ILTACON 2026 noted changes in another area.
As parents and educators are well aware, elementary school students can’t just come up with the right answer to a math problem anymore. In the AI age, they’re also graded on how well they document the process that got to the result.
Law firms face a similar dynamic, notes Donovan Bell, a CLOC board member and former head of global legal operations at Intel.
When law firms are explaining AI use to clients, their least effective response is to just list the tools they’re using at a high level. Instead, they need to show their work — and to do so in detail.
