Usage Alone Isn't Strategy:
COLPM's Futures Conference Sets the Tone for Law Firm AI Planning

The conversations that filled the room at the College of Law Practice Management's Futures Conference have now made their way into the national legal press, and for good reason. What Professor Richard Susskind, noted British author, speaker, and independent adviser to international professional firms, challenged attendees to consider during his keynote wasn't a simple technology update. It was a fundamental question about whether law firms are thinking strategically about AI or merely rolling it out operationally and calling that a plan.

Those themes are now front and center in David Gialanella's latest Law Firm Disrupted column for ALM, "’Usage Alone' Is No Longer the AI Question," which examines the widening gap between how quickly firms are adopting AI tools and how slowly they are rethinking the business and service-delivery models those tools should ultimately support. COLPM is proud to have convened this conversation through its Futures Conference and to continue serving as a forum where legal industry leaders can wrestle with exactly these kinds of questions.

The column captures what many in the COLPM community already recognize firsthand: firmwide AI rollouts, new tools, partnerships and big investments dominate the headlines, but they represent only the operational side of the equation. The strategic side, rethinking how legal services are actually delivered, is lagging.

"My sense is the operational side is far ahead of the strategic side," said Chris Boyd, COLPM's president and chief operating officer at Coblentz Patch Duffy & Bass, who helped bring Susskind's keynote to the Futures Conference stage.

Boyd doesn't dismiss the operational work as unimportant. Firms need to understand what tools they are using before they can make strategic decisions about their service-delivery model. But he is clear that adoption metrics alone don't tell the full story. "Ultimately, usage alone isn't strategy," he said, pointing instead to KPIs such as realization rates, write-off patterns on AI-assisted matters, the percentage of revenue tied to AI-driven pricing structures, and, most importantly, client retention and growth among clients who choose outside counsel based on AI capability.

"If we can show clients are coming to us more because we're using AI, that's the ultimate strategic goal," Boyd said.

The article also captures skepticism from outside the U.S. market about whether genuine transformation is occurring anywhere yet. Eric Chin of PwC's NewLaw in Singapore observed that "genuine adoption shows up when lawyers work differently, not just when they have access to a new AI tool," and that overcoming inertia "is less a technology problem than a leadership and operating model problem."

Susskind's keynote, built around his six AI hypotheses from How to Think About AI: A Guide for the Perplexed, pushed the Futures Conference audience past comfortable assumptions and toward a harder question that COLPM continues to champion: in three to five years, what will clients actually want from their legal services providers, and is the industry building toward that outcome or simply automating its way around it.

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