Using AI every day is not the same as gaining more leverage and momentum from it. Tom Lambotte shows lawyers where daily AI use stalls and gives three questions to find out where you stand.
Why Using AI Daily Is Not Making You Better at It
In 2013, an in-house lawyer at Kia Motors America got tired of guessing whether his outside counsel could use their own software. So Casey Flaherty built a test. Format a motion in Word. Prepare exhibits in PDF. Build an arbitration exhibit index in Excel. He timed himself at 30 minutes and set the pass line at an hour.
Ten associates at nine firms took it. The fastest finished in two and a half hours. The slowest took eight. The median was about five. Every firm failed, and Flaherty cut their rates until they re-tested.
His favorite example was a formatting change that takes 12 seconds with Word styles and cross-references. Most of the lawyers took about 10 minutes.
That was 13 years ago, and it was one lawyer’s procurement experiment, not a study. I bring it up because the same thing is showing up again, and this time the software costs $20 a month (for now) and sits in every browser tab in your firm.
A Number From June
Thomson Reuters published its Future of Professionals report in June 2026, surveying 1,816 people across 62 countries. Three-quarters of them use AI several times a week. Then 91% said their own organization falls short of what AI could deliver for them.
These are not holdouts sitting on the sidelines, but daily users who feel something is being left on the table and cannot name what it is.
I run the AI Leverage Sprint, a four-week program for founders and their teams, and 18 of the people who have come through it own law firms, from solos to a 270-person firm. The pattern repeats so reliably I spot it every time in the first session: people who use AI daily rate themselves near the top of the scale, yet they are barely tapping into its capabilities. They are getting tactical results but are far from tapping into the strategic leverage and possibility of AI. They do not know what they do not know.
The Driving Event That Changed How I Think About This
When I was 19, I had a 1992 BMW 525i. I took it to a BMW Car Club driving event and ran my first lap on the course with an instructor in the passenger seat. I thought I did really great!
Then we swapped seats and the instructor drove my car around for a lap.
My jaw dropped. I remember vividly thinking to myself, “holy bleep, my car can handle like this?” It was my car. I had been driving it daily for months. I thought the way I drove it showed me what it could do. What I was witnessing was the limit of my own skill, and I had mistaken it for the limit of the machine.
Nobody can tell you about that gap. You have to experience it: sit in the passenger seat while someone else drives.
What a Managing Partner Found Out
Alex Gertsburg runs a law firm in Cleveland. When I first suggested the sprint, he passed. His words: “I’m like an 8 or 9 out of 10. I’ve been using AI every day since it came out.” A few months after finishing, he told me he had been closer to a 2.5 out of 10.
Here is how he described what changed: “I was using it at a fraction of its strategic capability. I was using it as a delegation tool. Not as a strategic partner. Not as a creative partner.”
And: “I was not using it as a thinking partner, which is far more valuable.”
Every hour he saved counted, but he was saving them on the wrong end of the work.
Tactical Use Has a Ceiling
Most people use AI the way you use a vending machine. Insert task, receive output, move on. Draft the letter. Summarize the deposition. Clean up the email. Every one of those is a win, and the wins are what convince you that you have this figured out.
The ceiling on that approach is low, and you reach it fast. You can only save so much time on producing documents you were already going to produce.
The leverage is earlier, before anything gets drafted. It is in deciding which matters to take. Pressure-testing a settlement position. Figuring out what you are missing in a case theory at the point when changing your mind is still cheap.
That is a different activity than drafting, and nothing about using AI daily teaches it to you.
Three Questions That Tell You Where You Are
Here are three things you can check this week.
When did you last ask AI what you are missing? Look at your history. If nearly every prompt asks it to produce something, you are working tactically. The move that changes the most is asking it to find the hole in your thinking before you commit to it, and then asking who would disagree with you and why.
Does anything you built two months ago still work for you? Or does every conversation start from nothing? If you rebuild context from scratch each time, you are paying a tax on every interaction and the compounding never starts. (See Ben Schorr’s article on ways lawyers can personalize AI.)
Is your value per AI conversation going up? Frequency is the easy one to measure and it flatters you. Track what you get out of each conversation instead, because that tells you whether you are getting better or only getting faster at the same shallow work.
What ‘Better at It’ Looks Like for Lawyers
A litigation firm owner I work with used to spend three hours editing a draft into shape. He has that down to about half an hour, and he now pulls press releases straight out of 70-page complaints.
A personal injury firm put 31 people through together and scored their own AI capability at the start and the end. All went up, and nobody went down, which is the unusual result, because the normal pattern with a firmwide technology rollout is that two people run with it and everyone else eventually opts out. Their self-score went from a 3 out of 10 to a 7 out of 10 in 30 days.
Both of those came from the same people using the tools they already had, with someone in the passenger seat showing them what the car could do.
Both of those are self-reported, which is the weakness in my own argument. Casey Flaherty had a stopwatch. Nobody has built the timed version for AI yet, and the profession needs one.
Being Ahead of Your Peers Tells You Nothing
You are probably ahead of your peers, and that is exactly what makes this hard to see. Being ahead of the people around you says nothing about where you sit against what is possible. The profession already learned that once, in 2013, with Microsoft Word.
You do not need to chase the latest features of the week or use a pile of AI tools. You need one or two, maybe three, and the space to learn what they can really do.
Start with the second question. You can answer that one without taking anyone’s word for it, including mine.
Image © iStockPhoto.com.
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