Most firms I work with don't have an AI committee. AI decisions go to the technology committee, usually a group of partners and the CIO who meet to confirm that the firm has the right tools, that the tools are secure, and that they work. That's a necessary job, and the firms that do it well have kept a lot of bad software out of their environments.
The trouble is that AI decisions have stopped being tool decisions. When a firm decides which practice group gets AI first, it's deciding where it wants to compete. When it decides whether a vendor may learn from its documents, it's deciding who owns what the firm knows. When a task takes a fraction of the time it used to, the firm has to decide how that work gets priced. None of those questions belongs on a procurement agenda, and in most firms nobody else owns them.
What happens when nobody owns the strategy
You can see the gap in how AI work moves through a firm. Pilots get approved one at a time, each on its own merits. One practice group adopts a drafting tool, another licenses a research assistant, and associates in a third are building their own prompts in a general-purpose chat product. Each decision is defensible. Nobody is responsible for how they add up.
The annual innovation strategy often ends up written by one person, usually the head of innovation or knowledge, who then takes it to a committee that meets to review tools. The strategy turns into a list of tools because that's the question the committee knows how to answer. I wrote about what should go in that document instead in What belongs in a law firm's 2027 AI strategy.
Partners feel the gap as well. They hear about AI in pieces, from vendors, from clients and from associates, and they never see a single account of what the firm is doing and why. That's usually when their patience with the program starts to run out.
The ethics rules already assign this to management
There's a professional-responsibility reason to give AI its own owner. ABA Formal Opinion 512, issued in July 2024, says managerial lawyers must establish clear policies on the firm's permissible use of generative AI, and supervisory lawyers must make reasonable efforts to ensure that lawyers and nonlawyers comply with their obligations when they use it (summary in The Bar Examiner). A technology committee can approve a tool. The policy on how the firm uses AI, and the supervision behind it, is a management responsibility, and it needs a forum that can make management decisions.
What an AI committee decides
The test for whether something belongs on the AI committee's agenda is simple: would the answer change the client's experience, the firm's economics, or what the firm owns? If it would, it goes to the AI committee. In practice that covers six decisions.
- Which client problems come first. The committee picks a small number of problems clients have actually raised, and the practice groups that will take them on.
- What the firm owns and what it licenses. Which knowledge stays in systems the firm controls, and what a vendor may keep or learn from.
- How AI-assisted work is priced. What happens to fixed fees, alternative fee arrangements and hourly matters when the work takes less time.
- Who may build with AI, and where. Lawyers and innovation teams can now build working software with AI. The committee decides, with IT, which environment that happens in and what review it passes through.
- What data AI may use, and what clients are told. This includes the consent questions Opinion 512 raises for tools that learn from what they're given.
- How success is measured and reported. In terms partners recognize: matters, clients, and the work the firm delivered.
Security review, vendor due diligence, support and licensing stay with the technology committee. The two committees should share members, and the AI committee should hand tool decisions to the technology committee with a clear brief.
Who belongs on it
Keep it small, seven to nine people, so it can actually decide things. This structure works:
- The managing partner or a deputy as sponsor, so decisions carry the firm's authority.
- The CIO as co-chair. IT runs the environment every AI decision lands in, and a committee that brings IT in only at the end will make decisions IT then has to unwind.
- The head of innovation or knowledge management as the other co-chair, owning the strategy document.
- The general counsel or head of risk.
- Two or three practice leaders whose groups are going first.
- The CFO or head of pricing.
- One client-relationship partner who hears what clients are asking for.
How it should run
Make the meeting a strategy meeting. Status belongs in a short written note circulated beforehand, so the time in the room goes to decisions, blockers and what clients are asking for. It should be a closed-door forum where the working groups and IT can raise problems early and get them resolved before they become escalations.
Meet monthly. Report to the partnership every quarter, in business terms. Own the annual innovation strategy, so that the document the firm adopts each year is a record of decisions the committee already made, and nobody has to write it from scratch in the autumn.
The first 90 days
Month one. Charter the committee, name the members, and inventory every AI tool, pilot and experiment in the firm, including what lawyers are using on their own. The inventory is almost always longer than anyone expects.
Month two. Choose the first client problems and practice groups. Settle the data rules with the general counsel: what AI may touch, what vendors may keep, and how clients are told. Agree with IT on where business-side building happens and how it's reviewed.
Month three. Deliver the first report to the partnership, and draft the AI section of next year's innovation strategy from the decisions already made.
How we work with these committees
When Reframe starts with a firm, we ask to report into the AI committee, or we help the firm form one. Our engineers work alongside the firm's IT team inside the firm's own cloud environment, every change goes through the firm's own review, and we report progress in the committee's terms: which practice groups, which client problems, and what the firm can now answer that it couldn't before.
Most large firms already have a technology committee that does its job well. The firms that set up an AI committee alongside it this year will write next year's strategy from decisions they've already made.
Drafted with Reframe Editorial Agent, an AI employee at Reframe. 