The Confidence Gap

This misalignment between perception and reality makes clear that many firms think they are further along operationally than they actually are — and many are still struggling with some of the basics. As artificial intelligence begins to reshape how legal work gets done, that gap is about to matter a great deal more if it goes unaddressed. 

When asked to identify the biggest obstacles to effective collaboration, survey respondents identified the top three culprits as: insufficient training and onboarding to collaboration tools/processes; overreliance on email or similar methods of communication; and technology limitations, such as outdated tools or systems.

None of these are cutting-edge problems. All of them are solvable. And yet they persist — not because organizations lack the tools to address them, but because the fundamentals have been deprioritized or overlooked in the race to move ahead quickly.

For legal administrators, who serve as the operational backbone of their firms and are often tasked with bridging technology gaps and driving adoption, these findings land in a uniquely personal way. They experience these barriers firsthand while also being tasked with fixing them for the entire organization.

It’s worth taking a closer look at these persistent barriers — not only because they hinder productivity, but because they prevent firms from effectively harnessing more advanced technologies like AI.

Overreliance on email creates problems for firms in two distinct ways. The first is a capture problem: Critical decisions and communications made over email often fail to be saved into the firm's document management system (DMS). 

Without clear processes and compliance guardrails, the intelligence contained in email gets siloed or lost entirely. This has long been a problem, but in the age of AI it carries a new cost: The valuable information locked in email can’t be used by AI tools at all.

The second big problem with an overreliance on email is the workflow inefficiency it creates. When email becomes the primary channel for document collaboration, the process turns linear rather than parallel. One party drafts a document, sends it to the other party via email, waits, receives feedback, revises — a sequence that stretches timelines and creates chronic versioning problems.

Co-authoring tools that allow simultaneous editing have been available in the legal market for some time now, yet many practitioners remain entirely unaware of their existence. This is less a technology gap than a training and awareness gap.

That distinction matters. When knowledge workers cite “technology limitations, such as outdated tools or systems,” the underlying issue is often not that the technology is absent or incapable. The issue is that it has never been properly introduced, or that training and onboarding were insufficient. This isn’t surprising — lawyers’ schedules are driven by the billable hour, not by time set aside to learn new technology.

Fortunately, this is where legal administrators can have an outsized impact. As the architects of onboarding programs and technology rollouts, they are uniquely positioned to lower the barrier to awareness. Think of our earlier example of co-authoring. Making capabilities like this visible, accessible and easy to begin using — without demanding significant time from practitioners — is one of the most valuable contributions legal administrators can make to their organizations.

These collaboration barriers become even more problematic once AI enters the picture. In particular, unclear processes can quickly become a serious hindrance to effective AI adoption, which is why mapping out workflows is so critical. 

Consider a first-pass contract review or a high-volume NDA workflow. These tasks may feel routine, but they rest on a network of implicit assumptions: that an associate has access to the right playbook, that access controls are properly configured, that they know which tools to use and how. When a workflow succeeds, it is often because experienced individuals are “filling in the gaps” with judgment developed over time. 

AI cannot operate on implicit rules. It requires explicit ones. This means that before layering AI onto any workflow, organizations need to examine what that workflow actually consists of — who makes decisions, what assumptions underpin those decisions and who is accountable if something goes wrong.  

Again, legal administrators are well suited to lead this process mapping and to drive operational change. It is precisely this kind of “unsexy” work that actually winds up determining whether AI investments deliver on their promise.

The key lesson from the global research report is straightforward: Organizations that race toward AI adoption without addressing foundational gaps will not accelerate — they will simply amplify their existing problems.

This is what allows firms to go from thinking they’re ahead to actually moving ahead — with confidence.