Industry Corner: From lawyers to consultants: AI adoption’s disruptive impact

Key points:

• • Professional services firms are accelerating AI adoption to deliver personalization at scale, especially in research, drafting, and data analysis.
• • Ethical guardrails, data accuracy, confidentiality, and unclear ROI tracking remain major challenges as client expectations evolve.
• • AI is pressuring the billable-hour model, pushing firms toward outcome-based pricing while reinforcing the need for human judgment and accountability.

Industry corner is a monthly series on what company leaders believe are the most important best practices in their sector or organization to ensure growth and sustainable success.

March 2026 – In sectors like professional services, AI adoption is throwing a wrench in the traditional human-centric model, flipping the script to focus on outcomes, where personalization for one becomes personalization at scale.

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Law firms, accounting firms, and consultancies across the United States are racing to accelerate adoption and secure a competitive advantage. But integrating AI at scale brings in added complexities, particularly in terms of oversight, pricing, and evolving client expectations.

“There are many possibilities with artificial intelligence, and contrary to what many people think, not all of them are bad,” Donald Scarinci, managing partner of Scarinci Hollenbeck, told Invest: New Jersey. “AI will take humanity to a different place, just as computers did in the late 1970s and early 1980s.”

Despite Scarinci’s optimism, most leaders are approaching the subject with caution. “We need to stay on top of AI and its growth and make sure that we remain on the cutting edge, but in a thoughtful and careful way,” Paul Marino, New Jersey office managing partner at Day Pitney, told Invest:New Jersey. “We need to make sure that we are using AI in a way that makes us better lawyers because clients will expect us to do this.”

Those expectations, however, remain largely uncertain. According to a report by the Thomson Reuters Institute, based on more than 1,500 global respondents, two-thirds of corporate leaders believe their outside firms should use AI. Yet fewer than 20% are formally mandating its use through guidelines or RFPs.

Meanwhile, adoption continues to accelerate faster than firms can measure its economic impact. Nearly 40% of organizations report using generative AI, but only 18% say they track return on investment. Another 40% say they do not know whether ROI is measured at all — underscoring how quickly AI-driven personalization is moving ahead of standard performance benchmarks and pricing models.

Personalization at scale 

However, most firms agree that AI in professional services poses a major competitive advantage: personalization at scale. 

According to Yelena Epova, Atlanta office leader and international tax partner at Aprio, this shift is already changing the nature of accounting work. 

“When I began my career, much of the work involved data entry and low-level tasks,” Epova told Focus:Atlanta. “Today, we leverage AI to balance routine work, allowing our team members to spend more time with clients, focus on analysis, strategic planning, and higher-value tasks.”

The data backs that up. According to Thomson Reuters, top legal use cases for generative AI include lower-level administrative tasks like: legal research (80%), document review (74%), document summarization (73%), and drafting briefs or memoranda (59%). In tax and accounting, tax research (69%) and summarization (57%) lead adoption.

Beyond automation, generative AI tools also support high-quality data analysis for tailored client advice. 

In fact, Panorama Consulting Group, which advises organizations on technology implementations, noted that AI’s strongest immediate impact in professional services lies in structured analysis, particularly across areas such as project forecasting, risk detection, financial anomaly identification, and decision support. 

Legal sector 

Within the legal sector, AI tools are enhancing personalization, adjusting clauses based on jurisdiction, industry risk, regulatory updates, and even a client’s historical litigation exposure.

But industry leaders like Scarinci stress that customization must operate within strict ethical and compliance guardrails.

“None of these (AI) tools are substitutes for lawyers, gut instinct, or professional judgment,” he said.

In fact, the unchecked use of AI in the courtroom carries several repetitional and professional risks.

“There are horror stories about attorneys…citing cases in court or including them in filings, and they later learn that the cases do not actually exist,” added Marino. “The cases are AI mirages.”

He highlighted that firms looking to increase their AI uptake need to consider privacy and ethical fundamentals first as well, particularly whether or not all data gathered by AI is accurate.

Kevin Kocun, managing partner at intellectual property firm Lerner David, raised another concern: unintentional disclosure. 

In intellectual patent law, premature public disclosure of proprietary information can infringe confidentiality protections, the consequences of which can be extremely “serious”, as Kocun notes.

“Both our firm and our clients are cautious about this,” he told Invest:New Jersey. “Whether drafting patent applications or evaluating inventions, human oversight will always be necessary.”

Consulting

If legal and accounting work is being automated at both the research and drafting level, then high-level strategic consulting presents a more nuanced challenge.

Richard Spady, managing partner at Bain & Company in Atlanta, described AI as transformative but secondary to decision-making responsibility.

“Ultimately, the most important thing is using that knowledge to help clients take the right next steps in their business strategy,” Spady told Focus:Atlanta.

Strategic advisory work often involves navigating ambiguity, aligning executive teams, and making trade-offs that carry long-term consequences. In other words, AI can model scenarios and synthesize market intelligence, but it cannot assume fiduciary responsibility or corporate accountability.

In fact, according to Panorama Consulting, AI systems can amplify poor data or flawed assumptions, at which point, personalization becomes a mechanized error at scale.

Therefore, the general consensus among consulting firms is that AI enhances analysis, but that human judgment and liability remain fundamental.

Disrupting traditional models

On the other hand, perhaps the most disruptive implication of AI-driven personalization lies in pricing models.

Per Thomson Reuters, the billable-hours model is under pressure. In fact, generative AI’s ability to compress hours of work into minutes poses an “existential threat” to firms dependent on hourly billing. 

This is because if clients know that research or drafting can be automated, the logic of time-based fees weakens.

At the same time, client expectations are increasingly inconsistent, which is creating friction. Nearly 4 in 10 professionals surveyed by TR Institute reported being told both to use AI and not to use AI on client matters, depending on the client. 

This means that the market has not yet reached a stable equilibrium on the matter of artificial intelligence. Yet, as Scarinci notes, AI usage suits the interests of both clients and firms. 

With proper consent and supervision, professional services firms can essentially reduce the need for additional attorneys and pass on substantial cost savings to clients, he said.  

The logical endpoint may be outcome-based pricing, such as billing for results or strategic value rather than hours logged, as the TR Institute suggests. 

However, few firms have fully transitioned to this model, while economic pressure continues to build. The broader challenge is therefore balancing three opposing forces: accelerating AI adoption, regulatory guidance, and rising client expectations. 

Yet for the TR Institute, the solution is clear: “The winners in an AI-enabled future will be the professionals and their organizations that have the strategic clarity to determine how they’re going to provide services in a way that uses technology to complement and augment professional expertise, all while protecting themselves and their organizations from risk.”

Under these conditions, leaders in the professional services sector should consider GenAI’s best fit for their business, collect data metrics to benchmark AI performance, and discuss AI openly with clients, as advised by the Institute.

Want more? Read the Invest: reports.