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Every law firm agrees on one thing.
Partners are busier than ever.
They sit in more client calls, review more documents, respond to more emails, oversee more matters, and field more internal questions than they did even five years ago. And yet, many firms quietly admit the same frustration.
Despite new tools, partner time does not feel freer.
It feels more fragmented.
This is the real productivity crisis facing law firms in 2026. And it has very little to do with speed.
Why “productivity” became the wrong word
Productivity implies output.
Partners already deliver output.
The problem is not how much work gets done. It is where partner attention goes.
Partners lose time where judgment is not required. Searching for precedent. Re-explaining prior advice. Reconstructing matter context. Reviewing drafts that lack institutional memory. Answering the same questions from different teams in slightly different forms.
None of this is junior work. But none of it is partner work either.
When I recently sat down with Tara Waters, formerly Chief Digital Officer at Ashurst, she described it with striking clarity.
“It’s the accumulation of those everyday frictions,” she said. “Partners are juggling dispersed teams, disconnected systems, and constant context shifts. Hitting any friction point genuinely has a significant impact on their day.”
That observation landed because it mirrors what firms rarely say out loud. The issue is not lack of capability. It is constant interruption.
What AI can genuinely remove from a partner’s day
AI creates real value when it removes coordination friction, not when it tries to replace judgment.
In practice, this means handling the invisible work that interrupts thinking. Retrieving information scattered across systems. Synthesising prior matters, advice, and documents. Structuring complex material before a partner ever sees it. Acting as a conversational entry point to firm knowledge rather than another interface to manage.
When done well, this does not make partners faster thinkers. It makes thinking uninterrupted again.
As Tara put it during our conversation, “A lot of the key information exists, but it exists in different systems, or it exists in a partner’s head. You’re trying to pull from all of those sources to create a collective view, and that’s where things stall.”
Partners do not want answers. They want context that is already assembled.
Where most AI tools quietly disappoint partners
Many firms rolled out copilots expecting a dramatic productivity lift.
What they found was more subtle. Drafts improved. Research sped up. But interruptions did not disappear. The mental tax remained.
The reason is simple. Most tools optimise tasks, not attention.
A better clause still needs explanation. A faster summary still needs validation. A smart chatbot still lacks memory of how the firm reasons, what has been advised before, or how similar matters were handled.
Tara was candid about why adoption often stalls.
“I don’t think lawyers are as change-averse as the industry narrative suggests,” she said. “What they’ve experienced is a decade of tools that didn’t improve their experience. When change genuinely helps them, they are far more open than people expect.”
Partners notice quickly when a tool adds another step, even a clever one. Those tools quietly fall out of daily use.
Productivity does not improve when AI accelerates fragments of work. It improves when fragments stop existing.
The quiet shift partners are already making
In firms where AI adoption is working, behaviour changes before metrics do.
Partners stop asking where information lives.
They start asking questions out loud.
They expect responses that draw from prior matters, internal guidance, documents, and client-specific context in one coherent answer. They expect follow-up questions to be remembered. They expect continuity across conversations.
This is not about automation. It is about cognitive continuity.
Voice-based and conversational interfaces accelerate this shift, not because voice is novel, but because it mirrors how partners actually think. Questions surface mid-discussion. Answers are needed in context, not after a search session.
When AI aligns with that reality, it disappears into the workflow. When it does not, it becomes another tool to manage.
What AI cannot and should not solve
There is a tempting narrative that AI will fix partner workload.
It will not.
AI cannot replace client judgment.
It cannot negotiate nuance.
It cannot sense when advice needs caution rather than speed.
It cannot absorb responsibility.
When I asked Tara what AI could never replace, her answer was immediate.
“Experience.”
Partners who expect AI to think for them will be disappointed.
Partners who use AI to protect their thinking time will quietly outperform.
Why this becomes a competitive issue in 2026
Clients no longer measure firms by hours alone. They measure responsiveness, coherence, and confidence.
Partners who can answer without searching.
Who can recall prior advice without reconstructing it.
Who can move from question to judgment smoothly.
These differences compound.
As more firms deploy LLM-based systems, the baseline will rise. What feels advanced today will feel expected tomorrow. By 2026, the gap will not be between firms with AI and firms without it. It will be between firms whose AI reduces cognitive load and firms whose AI simply speeds up work that still fragments attention.
That gap is visible to clients, even if they cannot name it.
Connecting the problem back to a workable answer
In practice, addressing the partner productivity problem requires systems designed around how legal judgment actually unfolds.
Epic AI was built with that reality in mind. It treats firm knowledge, documents, prior matters, and reasoning as a continuous layer rather than disconnected tools. By combining retrieval, document intelligence, conversational access, and workflow-aware context, it reduces the invisible coordination work that fragments partner attention.
The value is not in doing more tasks faster. It is in allowing partners to stay in the work that only they can do, with the firm’s collective intelligence already assembled around them.
A note on The LatentBridge Blueprint
We recently launched The LatentBridge Blueprint, a video podcast series focused on how AI is actually reshaping work inside regulated, high-stakes environments.
Featuring Tara as one of our earliest guests was especially meaningful. She has been part of the LatentBridge journey not just as a voice from the industry, but as a friend, guide, and mentor.
It was a thoughtful, grounded conversation. And as I sat down to write this piece, I could not help noticing how often the same patterns surfaced. Fragmentation. Context loss. Tools that promise productivity but quietly add friction.
This blog is not a summary of that discussion. But it is informed by it.
You can watch the full episode here.
The real question partners should be asking
The question is not whether AI improves productivity.
The better question is this.
Does this system give partners their attention back?
Because the scarcest resource in a law firm is not data, documents, or hours.
It is uninterrupted judgment.
