It makes sense on the surface. Legal work is the core of what a firm does, so legal AI feels like the obvious starting point. However, firms are more than their practice groups. Behind every matter is a billing team, an operations team, a marketing team, and a network of business professionals who keep the firm running. But a firm where attorneys draft with AI while the billing team still reconciles invoices manually hasn’t adopted AI, it has procured a point solution for one department.
Most legal AI tools already produce good research and solid first drafts. The harder question is whether one platform can be useful to both the partner running a cross-border deal and the billing team closing out month-end.
The “Lawyer-Only” Problem
The first generation of legal AI tools was built for a narrow audience. They could summarize case law or redline a contract. While they may be useful for some, they were designed for one type of user doing one type of work.
That creates a problem. When your lawyers use one AI platform, and your finance team uses another (or nothing at all), you end up with fragmented workflows, duplicated effort, and no shared context across the firm. The billing team can’t pull from the same system that the attorneys are working in. Marketing can’t quickly generate client-facing materials informed by the firm’s actual work product. Operations is still stitching things together manually.
The average firm juggles 5 to 10 different applications to manage operations, and less than half are satisfied with how those tools work together. That fragmentation only gets worse when AI enters the picture as yet another disconnected layer.
What a Firmwide Approach Actually Looks Like
Hughes Hubbard & Reed, an Am Law 200 firm with a presence on four continents, recently took a different approach. After a four-month evaluation, they selected August as their firmwide AI platform, deploying it not just across practice areas but across finance, billing, marketing, operations, and administration.
The decision wasn’t driven by a single flashy feature. It came down to whether the platform could handle the range of work that actually happens at a global law firm, without creating more overhead for the people using it.
“We have lawyers spread around the world working across transactional, litigation and regulatory matters. The bar for any new technology here is whether it can handle that range without creating more work for the people using it,” said Neeraj Rajpal, Chief Information Officer at Hughes Hubbard. “August mirrors how our attorneys work while also delivering real value to our finance, marketing, and operations teams. That made this a firmwide decision, not just a legal one.”
That last line is worth sitting with. A firmwide decision, not just a legal one. That’s a fundamentally different way to evaluate AI.
Why This Matters Now
The legal industry has moved past the ‘should we use AI’ debate. According to Thomson Reuters, 26% of legal organizations are now actively using gen AI, up from 14% in 2024, and 78% of law firm respondents believe it will become central to their workflow within five years. The open question is no longer adoption but architecture: how do you deploy AI in a way that serves the full firm?
Point solutions don’t scale. They create tool sprawl, security headaches, and the kind of fragmented experience that makes people abandon technology rather than adopt it. A firm running separate AI tools for contract review, research, business operations, and client communications has a procurement problem, not a strategy.
Firms don’t need a dozen different tools, they need one platform that can capably and accurately cover their workflows. The consolidation pressure is real, and it’s coming from firm leadership, not just IT.
The Practice and the Business
The phrase that keeps coming up in conversations with forward-thinking firms is “the practice and the business of law.” It captures something important. A law firm’s competitive position depends on both halves working well and working together.
When a single AI platform connects the work lawyers do with the work that supports it, the whole firm moves faster. Attorneys can focus on the substance of their matters. Business teams get the context they need without chasing it down. And firm leadership gets a clearer picture of how the entire operation is performing.
The Evaluation Bar Is Rising
What stood out about the Hughes Hubbard process was its rigor. Instead of merely testing whether an AI tool could draft a document or a contract, they tested whether it could work across every part of the firm. That evaluation took more time upfront, but it avoids the more expensive problem of deploying something that only serves half your people.
If your firm is evaluating AI right now, here’s the question worth asking: Is this a tool for our lawyers, or is this a platform for our firm?
The answer will determine whether you’re making a technology purchase or a strategic investment in innovation.
If you’d like to see how August works across your firm, book a meeting with our team at august.law.