Law firm commentary argues that workflow redesign — not AI purchasing — is the critical factor in capturing technology value

A commentary piece published on Law.com makes the case that law firms are systematically misallocating their AI (artificial intelligence) investment by prioritising product selection over workflow redesign. The argument, drawing on a McKinsey survey of nearly 2,000 organisations across major industries, is that companies which had fundamentally redesigned their workflows were nearly three times more likely to capture meaningful EBIT (earnings before interest and tax — a measure of operating profit) impact from technology investment than those that had not. The author identifies a pattern familiar from earlier waves of legal technology — including legal research tools, document management systems, e-discovery, and knowledge management platforms — where firms that bought first and asked questions later captured a fraction of the available value. The same dynamic, the commentary argues, is now playing out with generative AI: firms are responding to client pressure to reduce costs by increasing technology budgets and running pilots, then selecting tools based on what peer firms are doing rather than internal workflow analysis. The practical prescription offered is to 'map before buying' — diagnosing how work actually flows through a firm before selecting tools to automate or augment individual steps. The commentary frames this as the central strategic divide in the current phase of legal AI adoption: firms that redesign workflows will capture disproportionate value; those that simply layer AI onto existing processes will not. No specific firms, tools, or transaction contexts were named beyond the general industry observation.