Behind before my feet hit the floor
It is 6:14 on a Tuesday and I am behind before my feet hit the floor. I have not opened my laptop. I have not had coffee. I have done nothing except pick up my phone, and in the hours I was asleep a new model shipped, someone posted about a tool I had not heard of, and a firm I respect announced a partnership with a platform that, the post implied, the rest of us should already be running.
I run a fair bit of my practice on AI: research, my clause library, the first pass on a playbook. I am about as far toward the front of this as a solo practitioner gets. And I still wake up most mornings feeling a step behind. So if you feel it too, here is the thing I had to work out for myself: that feeling is lying to you. You are not behind. You are closer to the front than you think.
The fear running through legal right now is doing a lot of the buying. One firm signs Harvey, another signs Legora, both announce it proudly, and every firm that has not done the same reads the announcement as a scoreboard. But the scoreboard only counts who bought something. It says nothing about who can actually use it.
And almost no one can. Most firms that bought a tool never trained anyone to use it. Maybe a one-hour workshop, and that was that. So you get prestige firms with the most capable software on the market barely touching it, or using it to rewrite their emails, poorly. Buying the tool is the easy half, and that is where nearly everyone stopped.
Which means the race you think you are losing has barely started. The hard half, the half that actually changes how the work gets done, is getting your people to understand the thing well enough to trust it on a real matter. Hardly anyone has done that yet. The competent middle of the field is wide open, and the door is standing right in front of you. The firms that train their lawyers this year will quietly lap the ones still busy announcing what they bought.
This is what firms have started asking me to come in and help with. Not which tool to buy. How to get their lawyers past the basic prompting workshop, how to adjust a few work processes so the tool has somewhere to live, what the data and the workflow need to look like before any of it pays off. AI is only as strong as the foundation it sits on and the workflow you build around it. The tool is the last thing you choose, not the first.
I am not pretending the whole market is asleep. Some firms use these tools genuinely well, and that is worth aiming at. And I will not pretend the 6 a.m. feeling ever fully goes away. It still finds me. What changed is that I stopped reading it as a warning and started reading it as noise, because I know where the real work is, and it is not on the leaderboard.
So if you take one thing from this, do not rush out to buy. Look at what you already have. Open the tool your firm is paying for and ask, honestly, how many of your lawyers use it, and how well. That gap, between bought and understood, is your real position in the race, and it is the most valuable ground you own right now. Close it, and the tool barely matters, because tools come and go and the understanding carries to the next one. We are past the days when knowing your way around Word was enough to feel current. The skill now is understanding a model well enough to know why one answer lands better than another, so you can steer it instead of taking what it hands you. You do not need an engineering degree for that. You need the time, and the decision to spend it on your people before your platforms.
Tomorrow at 6 a.m. something will have shipped overnight, and the scoreboard will flash again. Let it. You know which game you are playing now, and you are closer to the front of it than the noise wants you to believe. Today is a good day to start.
Footnotes
A few places I would point a lawyer who wants to begin today:
- Anthropic's AI learning hub. How to actually work with these models: guides, prompting principles, and the thinking behind them. Link: anthropic.com/learn
- Generative AI for Everyone (Coursera, Andrew Ng). A short, no-prerequisites course aimed at professionals and business leaders, not engineers. How the tools work, what they can and cannot do, and practical prompting. This is the train-your-people resource. Link: coursera.org/learn/generative-ai-for-everyone
- Jeff Su. Short, practical videos on putting AI to work in everyday professional tasks. Good for seeing it applied, not theorised. Link: youtube.com/jeffsu