Every legal conference this year has an AI panel. Every firm has an 'AI task force.' But when you actually walk the halls and ask people what they're using, the answer is more interesting and more honest than the keynote slides suggest.

Paralegals are using it to draft first-pass timelines from document dumps. Associates are using it to summarize depositions. Office managers are using it to write the emails they've been putting off. And almost everyone is using it wrong at least some of the time — which is how you learn what it's actually good at.

Where it fails

It hallucinates case citations. It misreads jurisdiction-specific nuances. It writes in a register that sounds like a law review article when you need something that sounds like a person. These aren't bugs that will get fixed next quarter — they're characteristics of the technology that require human judgment to manage. The firms that figure out where the guardrails go will outperform the ones still debating whether to use it at all.