When a firm chairman tells associates to learn AI “like having breakfast,” he’s actually making the strongest possible case for structured, intentional training. Here’s why.
A Bloomberg Law podcast published this week offered a candid window into how one of the country’s fastest-growing law firms is thinking about AI adoption. Chase Simmons, chairman of Polsinelli — which crossed $1.2 billion in revenue and $3 million profits per equity partner in 2025 — was refreshingly blunt: his lawyers must embrace AI tools, they won’t receive billable-hour credit for learning them, and if anyone needs motivation to develop those skills, “we probably have other things we should be concerned about.”
It’s a confident posture. It’s also, we’d argue respectfully, a significant strategic blind spot — and one that’s common across BigLaw and mid-market firms alike.
“This should just be an every day you wake up and have breakfast and think about how to incorporate this into your career.”
Chase Simmons, Chairman, Polsinelli
Simmons isn’t wrong about the urgency. The stakes are real. The expectation is reasonable. But the logic of “motivation is the only thing standing between a lawyer and AI competency” misunderstands how professional skill development actually works — and it misunderstands what’s at stake for the firm, its clients, and the profession.
Motivation is not a curriculum
Expecting professionals to self-direct their way to AI fluency is a bit like handing someone a scalpel and saying, “You should want to learn surgery.” Motivation is the necessary precondition. It is not the training itself.
Polsinelli’s own story actually proves this. Simmons described a period of roughly a year after ChatGPT arrived when the firm had “a lot of activity and not a whole lot of progress.” The breakthrough came when leadership assigned talented, business-minded people to build a governance and adoption framework — when they treated it, in his words, as “a business problem rather than a tech problem.”
That is precisely what structured AI training is. It is not remedial hand-holding for unmotivated associates. It is the organizational infrastructure that transforms individual motivation into consistent, measurable competency at scale.
Consider this
Polsinelli reports that 90% of its lawyers have used an AI legal platform and roughly two-thirds use one daily. Those are strong adoption numbers. But usage and mastery are not the same thing. A lawyer who opens an AI tool every day without knowing how to prompt effectively, evaluate output critically, or integrate it into client workflows is not gaining competitive advantage — they’re developing comfortable habits around underperformance.
The business case is unambiguous
Simmons is also candid about the existential dimension here. The “daily and weekly” legal work that has fueled Polsinelli’s growth — the routine, iterative, transactional work that builds deep client relationships — is precisely the category most vulnerable to AI displacement. He acknowledges this directly and says it “doesn’t bother” him, because those are table-stakes services, not the core of firm value.
We think that’s the right long-term answer. But it presupposes something critical: that the lawyers doing the more complex, relationship-dependent work are also the most AI-enabled. That they’re not just using AI, but using it well enough to deliver faster, sharper, more cost-effective outcomes than the competition.
That capability doesn’t emerge from enthusiasm alone. It requires deliberate instruction in how legal AI tools actually work, what they’re good at, where they fail, and how to build workflows around them responsibly. It requires training that is specific to legal practice areas — not generic technology onboarding.
- 76%of legal professionals say AI training is their top skills gap
- 3×faster task completion reported by lawyers with structured AI training vs. self-taught peers
- 90%of Polsinelli lawyers have used AI tools — but usage ≠ mastery
What “no billable credit” actually signals
We don’t think Simmons is callous. We think he’s making a cultural statement: this is not an optional initiative, it is a baseline expectation. That framing is powerful and appropriate.
But there’s a meaningful difference between “this is not optional” and “this requires no investment.” Expecting lawyers to absorb AI competency in the margins of a demanding billable practice — without structured time, without expert guidance, without a roadmap — is how firms end up with inconsistent adoption, variable quality, and real professional liability exposure.
Bar authorities in multiple jurisdictions have already issued guidance on AI use and competency obligations. Clients are increasingly asking about AI governance in RFP responses. The window for treating AI literacy as a personal initiative rather than a firm-wide professional standard is closing.
The firms that will win are investing now
Polsinelli’s growth story is genuinely impressive. And Simmons is right that firms which approach AI as a business transformation challenge — not just a technology rollout — will be the ones that pull ahead. His instinct to prioritize client-facing AI over internal back-office efficiency is also sound strategy.
But the firms that will sustain that advantage over the next decade are the ones pairing high expectations with real investment in structured, practice-specific AI training — for lawyers, paralegals, and professional staff alike. They are building learning infrastructure that ensures their people aren’t just motivated to use AI, but genuinely equipped to use it at the level clients now require.
That is what we do at Savvy Training. We work exclusively in the legal vertical — with law firms, legal departments, and professional staff — delivering training programs that are practical, current, and tailored to how legal teams actually work. We believe learning AI should be as structured and intentional as learning evidence law or contract drafting. Because the stakes are just as high.