David v Goliath
The prospect of AI levelling the playing field for smaller Irish legal practices appears close. The key to 'David' taking on the 'Goliath' law firms of this world will be in integrating AI with daily workflow. Sorcha Corcoran launches her slingshot
Developments in recent weeks indicate that the prospect of artificial intelligence (AI) levelling the playing field for smaller legal practices in Ireland is getting closer.
When exactly this happens hinges on deep workflow integration – in other words, embedding an AI-powered, end-to-end platform across the firm that achieves sustained value from intake to resolution of work.
Global legal AI provider Clio's inaugural UK & Ireland Legal Insights Report 2026, published in April, finds that 89% of 500 legal professionals surveyed now use AI tools in some capacity, with 70% having made that shift in the past year alone.
However, only 27% of firms have embedded AI widely across their organisation. The majority reports partial or minimal integration, confined to specific tasks or teams.
The report identifies workflow integration as the defining competitive variable for legal firms today.
More than one-third of legal professionals (37%) say that integrating new tools into existing workflows is their main barrier to realising value from technology. The challenge is more pronounced among mid-sized firms, where 40% cite integration difficulties compared with 23% in smaller practices.
"The message from this research is clear: AI is no longer a differentiator in itself. Rather, depth of integration is what separates high-performing firms from those leaving real value on the table," says Sarah Murphy (Clio's general manager, international).
"For solo, small, and mid-sized firms across the UK and Ireland, the opportunity is significant. These firms are often the most agile when it comes to reshaping workflows, and those that move from scattered adoption to cohesion stand to gain the most."
Competitive advantage
Armin Hendrich, co-founder of Irish-based consulting firm Sentient Expanse, points to two significant recent announcements that seem to boost larger law firms' competitive advantage in this context, but actually, in his view, open up possibilities for smaller practices because of their agility.
The first, on 7 May, was Legora's unveiling of Legora aOS – a purpose-built agentic operating system that enables legal teams to execute complex legal work, end-to-end. This marks what it says is a fundamental shift – from AI that assists with individual tasks to AI that drives legal work from start to finish, with human oversight.
At the heart of Legora aOS is the Legora Agent, the engine that powers it all. A party sends a contract redline at midnight. By the time the lawyer sits down the next morning, the Legora Agent has already reviewed every change, flagged the issues that need attention, and drafted a response that's ready to send.
Harvey and Legora are widely considered the leading enterprise-grade, legal-specific AI providers globally. Often compared to the 'Coke and Pepsi' of the legal-tech space, they dominate the market for large law firms and in-house corporate teams.
Minimum seat (or licence) restrictions and per-user costs of up to US$3,000 (around €2,600) a month for basic implementation make them out of reach for sole practitioners and firms employing ten people or less. Legora's aOS involves additional costs beyond this.
Proprietary AI platforms
The second development Hendrich refers to is a Financial Times report on 27 May that US law firm Kirkland & Ellis is investing US$500 million over the next three years to create its own proprietary AI platform.
Representing one of the largest legal-tech investments to date, the project will capture the firm's collective intelligence to enhance research and drafting.
A former partner at DLA Piper in Vienna, Hendrich says that Sentient Expanse is already in discussions with lawyers who have left traditional firms and intend to create complete, end-to-end tools (similar to Legora aOS and that of Kirkland & Ellis) for use in their own entrepreneurial practices, with the potential to make these available to other sole practitioners and boutique firms.
Officially launched on 21 May, Sentient Expanse provides operational, technological, and strategic consulting services specifically designed to help experienced legal professionals in Europe to build and scale independent practices.
"At the moment, solutions such as Legora aOS don't exist at a price point relevant to a small law firm, but we expect them to start appearing in the market in the next year or two, as certain players start to develop their own tools," Hendrich predicts.
"While they won't have the same marketing budgets as Legora, if they succeed, they may offer a real alternative to Legora aOS that small practices could implement within weeks. This means they will be able to react much faster than large firms to where the market is going."
Productivity gains
Research from Trinity College Dublin in collaboration with Microsoft, published on 29 April, reveals that SMEs that invest in AI are more likely to report significant productivity gains than large organisations (18% versus 8%), while organisations with a formal AI policy are ten times more likely to report major productivity gains (30% versus 3%).
The AI Economy in Ireland 2026 report finds that AI adoption is now near-universal, with 92% of organisations using or planning to use AI.
Despite this, 10% of leaders describe their deployment of AI as advanced or frontier-level, while SMEs remain disproportionately concentrated at the early stages.
"AI is already delivering real value for Irish organisations, freeing up thousands of hours a month," says Catherine Doyle (general manager, Microsoft Ireland). "The opportunity now is to make sure the benefits are felt equally. That means closing the confidence gaps wherever they exist and supporting SMEs to scale from early adoption to full integration. That's where the next wave of value lies."
Smaller practices won't necessarily find themselves at a disadvantage by taking a long position on whether to implement complete end-to-end AI solutions to realise this value, though, in Hendrich's view.
"For a start, not every firm with more than ten users is going to implement Legora aOS within the next weeks or months. If you look at the current implementation of Legora and Harvey, there's an extreme fear of vendor lock-in, with firms reluctant to commit to big upfront costs in case something better comes up," he says.
Partial deployment
"Firms aren't really deploying the solutions with all the in-depth capability they can offer. They're really only deploying them on the surface in ways that are only marginally better than the 'pro' versions of ChatGPT or Claude.
"Because of concerns around security issues and where data is processed, a lot of firms are just implementing Legora and Harvey as chatbots; they're not using them to tap into company documents or create institutional knowledge in the way Kirkland & Ellis aims to do."
While the implications of the Legora and Kirkland & Ellis announcements will take time to unfold in terms of deep workflow integration within the wider profession, this doesn't mean that smaller practices should hold off on AI adoption altogether, despite its current limitations.
"In my practice as a lawyer, which was around economic sanctions and policy, the answers I got from AI chatbots were wrong 70% of the time, but that didn't mean that 30% of the answers weren't incredibly helpful. Once you know how to use AI, it can bring research time down by tenfold," says Hendrich.
"With the market moving so fast, waiting for the dust to settle to fully understand AI is a problematic approach, as it ignores the fact that client expectations are rising.
"Clients assume now that law firms are using AI for efficiency gains and are looking more critically at lower-end resources. If you claim 30 hours' by a junior lawyer for research, for example, clients are likely to challenge why this wasn't done using AI."
Software as a service
Michelle Daly, chief operating officer at LEAP Legal Software in Dublin, says interest in its AI tools is definitely growing at present, as law firms that had been reluctant to embrace the technology feel they have no choice but to do so now.
Under its software-as-a-service model, LEAP costs around €140 per user per month, on average – the equivalent of half a billable hour for most firms. This includes all of its AI features, in addition to the full case-management, document automation, brief builder, and legal-accounts solution, as well as ongoing training and support.
"Around half of our 500 client firms are regular users of our AI tools, with the remaining amount dipping their toes in the water, experimenting on tasks rather than opting to fully embed them," she says.
"The vast majority of our clients have under ten users. Younger, more tech-savvy firms are nearly insisting to work with AI to improve their operation, while traditional firms are still very wary: they aren't as keen to embrace it because of concerns around accuracy and client confidentiality."
Inward and outward-facing
LEAP's two most popular AI tools are 'Matter AI' and 'LawY'. As Daly explains, Matter AI works like a legal assistant or executive, helping to manage all ingoing and outgoing material on a matter.
"Each matter has its own record. For example, a personal-injury case running over a long period of time might have a couple of hundred to 1,000 documents relating to it. Matter AI can do a variety of tasks, including summarising those documents in a matter of seconds, finding information, and drafting letters or emails," she says.
"For the PI claim, it can provide a chronology of hospital appointments or a list of injuries – it is capable of that level of granular detail. And you don't have to worry about accuracy, because everything is referenced. The tool is inward-facing and the information never leaves the LEAP platform," she says.
LawY is an outward-facing research tool, similar to ChatGPT, but legal-specific. The information is never shared or used to train the AI model, and it includes a generic verification tool within it.
"When LEAP first came to Ireland eight years ago, we advertised for solicitors to come on board with us to create a panel of verifiers who are specialists in their field," says Daly.
"If a user asks a question about drink-driving laws, say, and needs further clarification following the AI chatbot's answer in LawY, a member of this panel will give them a response in less than a day. This works really well for smaller practices or solicitors in an isolated position who don't have people to bounce things off. They don't have to provide any personal information when making this request."
Daly says that smaller practices should treat AI tools as an extra pair of eyes on their work: "AI tools are brilliant at summarising large amounts of information and saving an enormous amount of time, but this doesn't replace solicitors' judgement, brain power, and knowledge of a case. Whatever AI tool you use, there's still an expectation that you thoroughly review and sign off on any output."
Sorcha Corcoran is a freelance journalist for the Law Society Gazette.