Opening context
LawCo is a global commercial law firm with offices across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, serving technology, life sciences, and financial services clients across jurisdictions and time zones. 2,400 professionals were invited to participate in a firm-wide baseline — attorneys, legal assistants, business services, and operational staff. Over 1,000 responded, a 44% participation rate, contributing more than 3,400 verbatim comments.
The firm had recently appointed a new CIO with a mandate to advance AI adoption and modernize the firm’s digital platform. Before accelerating that agenda, firm leadership needed an independent view of how technology was actually landing across offices and practice groups.
The question was not whether the platform was running. It was whether it was ready.
The situation
Operational metrics showed availability and ticket performance. Strategic roadmaps described cloud migration and AI initiatives. Neither revealed how reliably existing technology performed in the daily work of a billable-hour firm — where friction does not accumulate quietly but converts directly into cost.
In a partnership model, technology inconsistency becomes political before it becomes operational. A degraded experience for one office or practice group is not an IT problem in isolation — it is a conversation the CIO will be asked to have with partners who bill by the hour and whose confidence in firmwide initiatives shapes whether those initiatives succeed.
The CIO needed to know where the platform was stable, where it was not, and which gaps represented genuine risk to the AI agenda she had been brought in to deliver.
“Before you can build on a foundation, you need to know its actual condition. The independent record gave us that. Some of what it showed confirmed what we expected. Some of it didn’t.”
— CIO, LawCo
What the independent record showed
The baseline segmented results by office, role, and service domain — connecting satisfaction scores with influence ratings to identify where friction intersected with client-critical work.
Two findings stood out immediately.
- Knowledge Management ranked last in satisfaction across the firm at 22% — and carried an influence score of 8.2 out of 10, placing it among the highest-consequence services in the stack. The service most critical to how attorneys find, organize, and apply the firm’s accumulated knowledge was the most broken part of the platform.
- Partners — the population whose productivity the entire technology agenda is designed to support — recorded a satisfaction score of 22% across the firm. Staff scored above 50%. The people with the most at stake had the lowest scores in the building, and the gap was not marginal.
Laptops carried the highest influence score in the dataset — above every other service domain — meaning device performance was shaping the overall technology picture more than any recent investment in platform upgrades. The tool attorneys rely on to locate documents under deadline, sat at 30% satisfaction with widespread comments describing it as non-intuitive and time-consuming.
An enterprise-grade AI chat tool was already in use and broadly appreciated. The appetite for AI was there. The foundation it would need to work on was not ready.
What changed
Four findings. One sequencing decision. The record made the case that existing reporting had not.
Innovation priorities were reordered against operational reality rather than roadmap assumptions. The firm could now distinguish where foundational reliability required attention before AI-driven capabilities were layered on top — and defend that sequencing with evidence rather than instinct.
The partner satisfaction finding gave the CIO something that ticket data and availability metrics could not: a defensible, independent picture of where the platform was failing the people who mattered most, sourced directly from those people — and ungameable.
“The partner satisfaction finding was the number that mattered most. The people whose productivity this is all designed to support had the lowest scores in the firm. The record made that impossible to miss.”
— CIO, LawCo
The outcome
By establishing independent ground truth across more than 1,000 professionals before acting on its AI mandate, LawCo ensured that its innovation agenda was grounded in the actual condition of its platform. The record showed where the foundation was stable, where it was not, and what needed to change before ambition could become delivery.
The AI agenda is intact. The sequence is evidence-led.
