Ask a managing partner why the firm adopted an AI tool and the answer is almost always about time. Faster first drafts, faster research, faster admin. Ask what it’s actually costing the firm and the answer gets a lot less confident.
New research from Asana, published in June 2026, found that 82% of IT leaders experienced unplanned or unexpected AI-related cost increases in the past year. Not because the subscription went up. Because nobody budgeted for deployment, integration, governance, and the dozen small costs that show up once a pilot becomes something the whole firm actually runs on.
The invoice isn’t the expensive part
Here’s the number that should worry a firm more than any of the others. 53% of IT leaders say an AI tool or agent took an action in the past year that landed them in real trouble: financial damage, legal exposure, or a hit to reputation. For a firm, that risk has a specific shape. It’s a citation that doesn’t exist, a case cite that got the holding wrong, a draft that went out under an attorney’s name without a careful enough read. Courts have already sanctioned lawyers for exactly that, and the tool doesn’t carry the malpractice exposure. The attorney does.
Meanwhile, 61% of decision makers say they’re fully accountable for what AI does in their organization. At a firm, that accountability doesn’t stop at the managing partner. It follows the name on the filing.
The time savings aren’t automatic either
Almost half of failed AI projects, 46%, fail for the same reason: the tool never had the context it needed. It didn’t know the firm’s workflows, its internal knowledge, or how a specific practice area actually operates. It guessed, confidently, and got it wrong in a way that read right.
That has a real cost too. More than a third of workers, 37%, spend upwards of 30 minutes every day correcting AI output because it lacked context. For a firm billing by the hour, that correction time either gets written off or gets billed, and neither answer looks good in front of a client questioning the invoice.
Tool sprawl makes it worse
This is the shadow AI gap covered in an earlier article: a quarter of workers, 25%, say they regularly use AI tools their organization hasn’t approved, and 38% use personal accounts for work tasks. Layer the cost angle on top of the confidentiality one, and a firm is now paying for tools nobody’s tracking, while client data moves through systems the firm never vetted and never budgeted for.
What actually works
Stop asking which AI tool to buy and start asking where the work is actually slowing down. A specific bottleneck, document review taking too long, a research memo that eats half a day, gives a firm something to measure. “Every firm down the street is doing it” doesn’t.
Before rolling a tool out further, give it the context it needs: firm templates, past work product, an actual matter workflow, not a blank prompt box. And know which tools associates are really using, not just which ones got approved. That’s the difference between AI that pays for itself and AI that shows up as a surprise on next quarter’s invoice, or worse, in a malpractice complaint.
If you want help figuring out where AI is actually saving your firm money versus where it’s quietly costing more than the subscription suggests, our managed IT services for law firms can help.