The article below features James Grice, Head of Innovation & AI at Lawfront. It was published by LPM in May 2025 and can be read here.
While genAI continues to capture attention across the legal sector, automation remains a no less transformative force for SME law firms. From managing resistance to change, to building seamless client journeys, leaders at forward-thinking firms tell LPM editor Reem Khurshid how the strategic application of automation is a safe bet for creating long-term value
Challenging the resistance to change
Automation in legal work is as much about people as the technology behind it. One of the biggest barriers leaders find is cultural, particularly with a mindset that persists around automation representing an existential threat to the billable hour.
Grice believes this will change as firms shift towards alternative pricing models, but in the meantime the focus should remain on alleviating administrative burden — “tasks that lawyers will appreciate being taken away from them to focus on more valuable, enjoyable billable work elsewhere”.
Ttofis also finds there’s a perception that automation strips away the “human touch” in legal service delivery — a core element of client relationships. She challenges this view, arguing that all automation is authored, and can therefore be made to feel personal: “The client experience is a human experience, but this can be engineered. It doesn’t follow that automating parts of that journey removes the human touch. I might have automated emails sent out when a matter is completed, but those are coming from my inbox. I’ve drafted that template; it has my tone of voice. We put ourselves into our processes.”
Grice underscores the need for automation efforts to be led by those working at the coalface, insisting that the best improvements to efficient ways of working materialise “when lawyers have been involved in, or driven, that process”. The challenge then is to apply consistency and scale it across the business.
Winning hearts and minds
Getting teams ready, willing and able to automate is fundamentally a question of leadership. At Farringford, Wingfield believes one of the most important things leadership can do is simply to talk about automation and AI. “It doesn’t need to be a technical discussion,” he says. “It’s more about communicating the cultural shift — this technology is here, it’s happening, and we’re embracing it.”
And much as he believes SME firms need to be selective about where to focus their efforts, there comes a point where “you just have to put the tools in people’s hands, get stuck in and experiment” to build knowledge and enthusiasm across the firm. He adds: “You’ve got to be strategic in change management, but at the same time it’s important to keep the momentum going with incremental gains to truly sell the narrative.”
Ttofis says she’s had to evolve her own approach to introducing change. “Even the most dynamic, forward-thinking team can find change quite disruptive, and it’s important to manage that sensitively.” Now, she introduces changes to processes at set times — monthly or quarterly — so the team can review and discuss updates together. “It’s important to communicate your vision to explain why these changes are being made. But the reality is that when you create one solution, you will create another problem elsewhere, so it’s equally important to be responsive to feedback and keep refining your processes.”
For Grice, the routes to delivering innovation across Lawfront’s hub firms may not always lead to genAI — but, as with any hot topic, it is an excellent conversation starter about the possibilities of change. He recalls: “I once had a lawyer ask me if Copilot could do something that really only needed mail merge, which is an automation that’s been around for decades. So it’s not just about getting people used to the idea of genAI but also raising awareness about some of the fundamentals of technologies, and more tried-and-tested tools they might not have considered yet.”
As part of this effort, Lawfront has assembled an innovation and AI champions group, with representation across all hub firms and practice areas. “The goal is to connect lawyers with tools to which they might not previously have had access and help them to understand the art of the possible. When it comes to genAI, it’s been really uplifting to see that moment when the penny drops and they start to understand just how powerful and versatile it is.”
Where automation can make a difference
While there’s no shortage of established use cases in legal and other industries that can be applied to the operational side of law firm processes, Ttofis also believes that nearly every part of legal work — short of the actual expertise and advice — can be a strong candidate for automation. “All areas will require an onboarding process, a way to book meetings, track progress, follow up and get feedback. All these are automatable.”
Wingfield agrees that there are legal tasks that are “repeatable, predictable, shareable and buildable”, which “provided they are performed in-house and under your control, can be radically transformed through automation”.
When it comes to genAI, Grice says: “Anywhere the human has the final say is currently a safe space for law firms to look at.” These include areas like document summarisation and data extraction, which are relatively easy to implement, and crucially, “aren’t about automating away human involvement”.
He also points to specific practices to highlight different experiences with legal tech. Litigation, for example, is an area where best-of-breed technologies already exist and can quickly add value. Then there are others, such as family practice, which have tended to be underserviced in terms of dedicated solutions. While looking at how more generalist AI tools can support these teams, Grice finds this introduces new challenges. “One of our lawyers found that Copilot Chat tends to reject prompts that include sensitive topics, which often arise in family or criminal law. So we’re now also exploring working with vendors that can offer us more control over content filtering.”
Beyond the task(s) at hand
The long-term goal for forward-thinking firms is scalability — not just of processes, but of quality and experience. Ttofis founded iLA with the idea that every completed matter should be treated as a marketing opportunity and have built-in processes to enable this. “Too often, people limit themselves based on what they see a product or other business is doing, rather than asking themselves what it is they seek to achieve,” she says.
Automation invariably involves making yourself less visible in the day-to-day work, but this should not be feared, she says. All of iLA’s internal work processes are captured in video recordings, with AI-generated transcriptions and guides. “Having all your systems and processes in place and well documented is brilliant for enabling your team to quickly solve problems themselves, and for scaling the business,” Ttofis believes. The firm is now working on a custom chatbot trained on all its process documentation to take self-servicing — for the team and clients — to the next level.
Grice sees the potential to capture and consolidate granular data from across Lawfront’s hub firms into a unified ecosystem to inform and empower the group in decision-making around areas such as pricing and efficiency. “There’s enormous value in the data firms already have, but most aren’t leveraging it.”
For Wingfield, automation isn’t just about doing the same work faster, it’s about rethinking and reconfiguring how the work is done. “When we’re working on a sale and purchase agreement in M&A, for example, we’re usually not thinking about writing a case study until near the end of the transaction,” he says. “But it should probably be the first thing we consider, because it impacts future business.”
He envisions a world where automation can help a firm’s marketing team prepare a case study draft before the deal is done, simply by integrating knowledge capture into existing processes and designing seamless workflows.
“People have tended to view automation as a means to do what they’ve always done, just automatically. But the real opportunity is the ability to get the bigger picture view of everything that your firm does and the value of that work, so that you can do it better and spot more opportunities to seize advantage,” he concludes.
As the hype around genAI continues to dominate legal tech discourse, automation may have faded into the background to an extent — but it is no less transformative for SME firms looking for a clear, immediate path to operational efficiency, client satisfaction and sustainable growth. Clearly, there is still tremendous untapped potential for a firm strategically leveraging automation to revolutionise the business, one process at a time.
