Extract from Matt Bares’ article, “Law Firms Don’t Have an AI Problem. They Have a Deployment Problem.”
Adoption is settled. What now separates the firms getting a return from the ones writing off the spend isn’t better technology—it’s the operational work of deployment: the data, the workflows, the governance and the daily management that turn a tool into a capability.
Every firm has done something about AI by now. A committee was formed. A pilot was run. Vendors came through and impressed the room. Somewhere in the budget is a line item leadership can point to and say, yes, we are investing in this.
And yet the sentence I hear most often from firm leadership has not changed: “I have spent money on AI, and I am not getting a return on the investment.” The hype cycle has a name for where that leaves us—the trough of disillusionment, where inflated expectations meet unrealized results. But the gap between what was spent and what can be shown is not a technology problem. The technology works. The failure is operational—it lives in everything that happens after the purchase: the data the tool runs on, the workflows it has to fit inside, the governance that says who may use it for what, and the day-to-day management that turns a license into a capability. This is a deployment problem, and deployment is operational work.
