A number of law firms have rushed to introduce generative artificial intelligence systems in their workplaces faster than their clients’ own legal departments.
This head start in adopting new tools has prompted some of them to start or redouble efforts to market themselves as legal tech consultancies.
The potential for this business line to become lucrative remains unknown, as a number of clients have so far proved reluctant to pay for it.
However, by donning tech consultant hats, the law firms have been able to pitch tech-based services to clients’ top decision makers, and some have secured paid assignments.
Chief legal officers generally open their doors when their external law firms offer to share tech expertise, says Alex Brown, head of technology, media and telecoms at UK-based Simmons & Simmons. In-house legal departments in many businesses are at “the bottom of the queue” for technology resources, he explains.
Generative AI has accelerated the growth of Madrid-based Ecija’s legal tech consultancy unit, which the firm set up in 2021 and now includes more than 20 professionals, a number expected to grow to 30 by the end of the year.
Alejandro Touriño, Ecija managing partner, identifies legal tech consultancy, as distinct from general business advice, as an important opportunity for the firm, which employs more than 1,000 lawyers across more than 30 offices in Spain, Portugal and Latin America. Few other legal tech providers market aggressively in those regions, he explains
In January, the firm announced an alliance with digital technology group NTT Data in a joint initiative to market AI-powered services to corporate legal departments across these geographies.
“In the first half of 2025, sales figures were already four times higher than those of the same period in the previous year,” says Touriño.
Legal tech services still account for only about 5 per cent of Ecija’s total global revenues, he concedes. But the profit margins for tech consultancy work match those of “other high-demand legal practices”, he adds.
Touriño predicts that revenues in this area of work will grow at the same time as income streams from other tasks decline — such as routine compliance reviews and contract management, and certain labour law filings, that can be done more efficiently with AI tools. Many legal teams have been able to absorb such tasks in-house thanks to better and more user-friendly legal tech becoming available, he points out.
Ecija says it has worked with one corporate client’s technicians to help its in-house legal teams to integrate Microsoft applications, including Copilot, in order to set up a system for tracking reviews of more than 1,000 agreements.
The firm also set up an AI-powered platform for the same client so that managers can analyse and compare its relationships with outside suppliers, including law firms.
Noerr, a Germany-based firm that employs more than 500 lawyers, has set a fixed price range for generative AI tech consultancy of €20,000 to €30,000, says Thomas Thalhofer, a partner who focuses on digitisation of businesses.
The firm “was experimenting” when it set that rate, he says. “We tried to get a price that was not too high, to motivate clients to work with us.”
To develop Noerr’s offering, which includes customising guides for AI prompting, tailored to an in-house legal department’s needs, Noerr has so far hired around 15 AI experts and data scientists, Thalhofer says.
A “couple of clients” have licensed the product and another 10 to 15 have shown “serious interest,” he says. The firm has not yet hit the break-even point for its investment in AI. But “it is not far off,” Thalhofer predicts.
Simmons & Simmons, which employs about 1,180 lawyers worldwide, has designated 3 per cent of them as “AI champions”, with each expected to devote 300 hours a year to acquiring expertise in the new technologies.
The firm has not yet organised “a staple offering” of tech consulting packages and it is “doing quite a bit for free,” Brown says.
Drew Winlaw leads Simmons Wavelength, formed after the acquisition of his legal engineering consultancy in 2019, which has focused on developing a range of in-house tools for the firm.
His team is now working on exploiting large language models and has not explicitly charged some clients’ in-house legal departments to develop prompting skills. But in two instances, because of the extensive amount of the work, the firm has received payment for those services. “They’re paid because they’re larger scale,” Winlaw says.
At Baker McKenzie, the US-led international firm, which employs about 4,500 lawyers, Danielle Benecke leads a team of around 10 lawyers and tech engineers.
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The team aims to help Baker McKenzie’s practice groups to develop AI tool-driven approaches to address clients’ needs. “We see AI as a paradigm shift, not just for the profession, but for the wider market, and our role is to help clients navigate that,” Benecke says.
Her team recently worked with the firm’s IT experts in responding to a client’s cyber security breach. They used AI tools and created workflows that analysed the client’s data to comply with requirements to report data breaches across jurisdictions worldwide.
They then updated their advice as the client reported more, and revised, information about the breach. Within minutes, the Baker McKenzie cyber experts could respond to “new facts” and amend the assumptions embedded in the AI tools’ logic, Benecke says. She declines to discuss pricing.
Such reticence is not surprising, given the lack of clarity at this stage of how AI-powered legal tech will alter relationships between law firms and corporate clients as it continues to develop. “It’s not simply making faster and more efficient existing services, it’s adding depth of insight,” says Benecke.
“There’ll definitely be a shift in the market where clients will undoubtedly use AI with their in-house teams to do more and empower their people more,” says Brown at Simmons & Simmons. “Of course, they would. That’s what we’re doing.”
But he adds: “They are also interested in us doing that in a much more sophisticated way, and getting more and better out of us. And so they should be. That really is where much of the conversation is with clients right now.”
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