Law firms are racing to adopt AI but clients across Asia's legal market are still waiting to see tangible value delivered

A new analysis from Law.com finds that two years into the legal industry's generative AI (artificial intelligence tools that draft, analyse, and summarise text) adoption race, a significant gap has opened between the pace at which law firms are deploying AI tools and the value that clients say they are actually receiving. The piece focuses on Asia's legal market as a case study but identifies a dynamic with global resonance: firms are investing heavily in AI platforms, often at significant cost, while clients remain unconvinced that the efficiency gains are being passed through in the form of lower fees or meaningfully faster, higher-quality work product. Separately, a piece in the New York Law Journal examines how generative AI and machine learning AI have transformed trade secret law, both in terms of the risk that confidential training data constitutes a misappropriation and in terms of the difficulty of protecting proprietary legal analysis when it is processed through third-party AI systems. In the same corpus, a US federal judge, Judge Jesse Furman, discusses the applications of AI for judicial work and reflects on one of the first sanctions cases involving AI-generated court submissions. Together, these threads point to a profession at an inflection point: the tools are proliferating, but the legal frameworks governing their use, and the client relationships that justify their cost, are still being worked out.