As 2025 draws to a close, one theme has defined the year: Artificial Intelligence (AI). No matter where you looked or who you talked to, AI was front and center, from CLE seminars and conference keynotes to news coverage and industry reports.
For example, the American Bar Association recently released its “AI Task Force on Law and Artificial Intelligence Report.” This was the second in a series of reports addressing AI’s impact on the legal profession. The report covered a lot of ground, with topics ranging from AI adoption and its impact on access to justice to how law schools and the courts are approaching AI.
One of its key conclusions was that our profession has reached a crossroads: AI adoption has surpassed understanding. The majority of legal professionals now use AI but do not fully appreciate the practical and ethical challenges that arise when using AI. In other words, as the report’s authors explained, “the conversation has shifted from whether to use the AI technology to how to use it.”
According to the report, legal professionals continue to accomplish relatively simple tasks with AI, such as summarization, document review, drafting brief documents, and issuing client alerts, rather than more complex legal work that involves confidential client information. This finding aligns with the results of the 8am 2026 Legal Industry Report that I authored, and that will be released this spring. That data shows that AI implementation in law firms focuses on routine work, with top tasks including drafting correspondence, general research, and brainstorming.
This pattern of use helps explain why cost will play such a significant role in the next phase of AI adoption. As AI tools improve and concerns around risk and reliability decrease, practitioners will seek to apply additional AI tools to more complex legal work. Whether they’ll be able to do so, however, will depend largely on affordability, and that may be determined by firm size.
AI has the potential to level the playing field by enabling solo and small-firm lawyers to compete more effectively with larger firms. However, because “the legal industry is moving toward a stratification of firms into various degrees of technology ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots,’” many of the most advanced legal AI tools remain prohibitively expensive. In the absence of changes to pricing models or policy intervention, larger firms will continue to retain their longstanding competitive advantage.
That same cost dynamic extends beyond law firms and into the access-to-justice space where, once again, AI offers tremendous unrealized potential. The report cites a Berkeley-led study documenting 100-plus real-world AI use cases in legal aid, “including ratings, recommendations, and estimates of efficiency gains.” However, pricing is once again a barrier, and “high subscription costs for the best and most reliable legal AI tools might make those tools unaffordable and inaccessible to the access-to-justice community.”
The report also highlights another area where AI’s promise has not been fully realized: legal education. Historically, law schools have been slow to integrate technology into their curricula, but the pervasiveness of AI is beginning to reverse this trend.
Until recently, most law schools turned a blind eye to AI, forcing law students to fend for themselves. Students from 16 schools, including Harvard Law, the UCLA School of Law, and the University of Miami Law School, filled that gap by forming student-led groups devoted to understanding AI’s impact on the profession.
Fortunately, that tide is finally turning. Fifty-five percent of law schools now offer AI-focused courses. Another 83% provide hands-on AI experiences like clinics or labs, and Case Western Reserve Law School even requires all first-year students to obtain legal AI certification. Recognizing that AI isn’t going away and will only become more ubiquitous, law schools are finally treating AI literacy as a core professional skill rather than an optional add-on.
Our profession is entering a pivotal phase where AI’s impact can’t be ignored and must instead be accommodated. It’s already part of more basic workflows in law firms. The next stage of adoption will determine whether it benefits those who need it most or follows the money to the top of the food chain. Will it expand access to legal services and improve the quality of representation, or instead reinforce existing gaps across our profession and system of justice? Only time will tell.
Nicole Black is a Rochester, New York attorney and Principal Legal Insight Strategist at 8am, the team behind 8am MyCase, LawPay, CasePeer, and DocketWise. She’s been blogging since 2005, has written a weekly column for the Daily Record since 2007, is the author of Cloud Computing for Lawyers, co-authors Social Media for Lawyers: the Next Frontier, and co-authors Criminal Law in New York. She’s easily distracted by the potential of bright and shiny tech gadgets, along with good food and wine. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikiblack and she can be reached at niki.black@mycase.com.
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