The past 12 months have seen an extraordinary volume of change in legal tech. Professionally, practically, and psychologically, such evolution can be exciting, but also overwhelming.
In conversation with Lawyers Weekly, Thomson Reuters’ AI strategy lead for CoCounsel, Jen Lee, said: “AI is shaping the future of the legal profession today.
“While the benefits and risks of AI-empowered legal work continue to be well documented, lawyers also need to navigate the psychological shift required to become AI-ready.”
As Harvey’s Australian country manager, Ashleigh Whittaker, put it: “The pace of AI change is daunting for anyone, let alone busy lawyers who have limited time in their diaries as is.”
Many Australian lawyers, Lee said, “welcome the efficiency and insights AI brings, but concerns about accuracy and how to integrate new tools into traditional workflows remain. This challenge is not only technological; it is cultural and highly dependent on how well AI is embedded within organisations.”
At a time of such a bounty of technological change, fomenting necessary practical and professional shifts in service delivery and client interaction, it is pertinent to consider how the psychology of change – that is, the processes shaping how people respond to and navigate shifting landscapes – may impact upon practitioners. Here, a handful of tech vendors offer their perceptions of how well lawyers are managing change in the age of AI and what will constitute best practice for their businesses moving forward.
Change coming thick and fast
According to Legora’s APJ lead, Heather Paterson, Australian lawyers are acknowledging a fundamental truth: “change is difficult, and moving away from decades of established practice requires a significant mindset shift”.
“Managing the psychology of change requires a strategy that respects human nature whilst providing value quickly. Leading firms overcome this by ensuring their tech is highly relevant and provides a fast speed to value,” she said.
“When a lawyer sees immediate, high-value results, the psychological barrier to adoption drops. This is being driven by ‘AI Champions’ – specialists who prove these tools aren’t threats, but essential partners.”
NextAI Solutions co-founder Shamik Ghosh said the significant advancements witnessed in 2025, with AI being used to disrupt, enhance and speed up legal work, have “laid the foundation for a once-in-a-lifetime transformation for Australian lawyers and [have] forced them to change their mindset on how they operate”.
Sole practitioners, SMEs, and early-stage law firms have been early adopters, he said, and “have dealt with this psychology of change much more easily as they see AI as an enabler to their success”, while “more established law practices have struggled to fit AI into their operating models and trying to understand how AI disrupts their traditional services business model predicated on billable hours”.
For Mary Technology chief executive and co-founder Daniel Lord-Doyle, while Australian lawyers are among the most AI-mature globally, the pace of tech developments “really varies by firm, and even by individual lawyer”.
“Some have embraced it quickly, while others have found it challenging. In our experience, change management is the toughest hurdle. Adopting AI is a significant shift, so vendors should be providing training, adoption, and ongoing support alongside the technology itself. That’s what ultimately drives real outcomes and where firms start to see the benefits,” he said.
Second wave of AI adoption
For Habeas founder Will McCartney, there is also a shift in market psychology amid the pace of technological change in Australian legal services. This shift, he said, is not an increase in excitement about tools, but more discernment.
“Legal tech decision-makers seem far less interested in broad claims about ‘AI capability’, and far more focused on whether a tool genuinely understands their jurisdiction, practice area, and day-to-day workflows,” he said.
Habeas has, he said, recently gained pilot traction with larger firms that were previously cautious about working with start-ups, and the answer as to why “seems less about momentum and more about market maturity”.
“Compared to late 2025, lawyers are now upskilling rapidly. They have a better grasp of how legal AI actually works, its limitations, and where generic tools fall short. As a result, psychology has shifted from experimentation to intent,” McCartney said.
“We might cautiously describe this as a second wave of legal AI adoption,” he said.
General-purpose AI will always have its place, McCartney continued.
“But, as the market becomes wiser, confidence is increasingly flowing towards legal intelligence platforms that are narrower in scope, architected for particular workflows, and more disciplined in how they support professional judgement,” he said.
Practical steps
What Harvey has seen work well with its customer base, Whittaker outlined, “is specifically to advise not trying to stay up to speed on everything, and instead choosing one practice area, skill, or person to learn from”.
“Some of my favourite examples are informal lunch and learning where lawyers share tips and tricks that worked for them with others in the same firm, or a podcast or blog club where people listen to or read an update from an expert and discuss it,” she said.
“I think the mistake most lawyers make is feeling like they need to be experts on everything or consume all the information there is to have about AI, and that’s not tenable.”
“I also think you have to make it enjoyable – our most successful deployments of Harvey have made the rollout enjoyable and relevant versus compliance-based, and I think that matters in how lawyers feel about AI within their organisation,” Whittaker added.
Success, Paterson said, relies on a top-down approach that encourages experimentation.
“For example, within a month of adopting Legora, MinterEllison saw firm-wide applications exceed 90 per cent, including at the partner level. By prioritising tools that deliver value quickly, firms are transforming scepticism into a competitive advantage, proving that even the most traditional workflows can evolve when the benefits are instant and undeniable,” she said.
There is, Lord-Doyle mused, a lot of noise in the market right now: “Dozens of tools, bold claims, and promises of instant productivity. Inside real firms, the pattern is much simpler and much more human. The firms that succeed treat AI adoption as a process, not a flip of a switch.”
He listed three factors that he said “consistently lead” to successful AI adoption by legal teams: starting small and building internal champions, choosing users that actually have time to test, and keeping the feedback loop tight and data-driven.
Change fatigue, he continued, is of course a real thing, and “if your team is already rolling out new billing software, a new case management system, and several other internal tools, no AI rollout will survive. AI adoption requires space, focus, and attention”.
“Without clarity, teams will test the wrong tasks, evaluate the wrong metrics, or try to solve problems that were never properly defined,” he said.
The bottom line, according to Lord-Doyle, is that AI adoption is “not about massive rollouts or forcing tools onto unwilling teams. It is about doing the simple things well”.
This includes, he said, starting small, choosing motivated users, testing clearly defined tasks, comparing results to older processes, checking in regularly, relying on vendors for support, and setting clear criteria for success.
“When firms follow these principles, they give their teams the best chance to adopt AI successfully and to produce better, faster, and more confident work,” he said.
Looking ahead
This year, Ghosh said, will continue to increase this pace of transformation, and lawyers across the legal profession must build more awareness, understanding and adoption of how AI can be used, to build a sustainable competitive advantage.
To do this, he said, “they must look for AI that delivers transformational gains, such as materially reducing turnaround times or unlocking new service revenue models, while still allowing them to maintain human oversight, verification and ethical best practice”.
To maintain a leadership position through 2026 and beyond, Lee added, Australian firms should accelerate from adoption to strategic integration.
“Focus on developing visible AI strategies, embedding AI competencies into performance frameworks, and cultivating continuous learning cultures,” she said.
“The firms that will thrive are those viewing AI not as a threat, but as their competitive advantage in delivering exceptional client outcomes.”
Staying on top of continued change in 2026, McCartney concluded, will mean “knowing where serious expertise is being built, asking sharper questions about how systems retrieve and reason, and paying attention to companies that operate with depth and intentionality”.
Jerome Doraisamy is the managing editor of professional services (including Lawyers Weekly, HR Leader, Accountants Daily, and Accounting Times). He is also the author of The Wellness Doctrines book series, an admitted solicitor in New South Wales, and a board director of the Minds Count Foundation.
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