Big Law Is Learning What Savvy Has Always Known: AI Training Needs a Human Touch
A recent Bloomberg Law report confirms something we’ve believed from day one: technology adoption in law firms doesn’t succeed through top-down mandates; It succeeds through people teaching people.
According to the report, firms that simply told attorneys to “use more AI” haven’t seen the productivity gains they expected. What’s working instead is training tailored to how individual attorneys, and professional staff, actually learn. Some need hands-on training and practice inside of the tools, some need a quick reference guide, some need to hear from a peer they trust rather than an outside expert. One training leader at a major firm put it simply: they’ve stopped teaching technology and started teaching behavior change.
The article also highlights a shift away from single-tool training toward broader, tool-agnostic skills — things like effective prompting and AI-informed workflows that hold up no matter which platform a firm is using this year. And it points to a rising trend of firms building “AI buddy” programs, pairing power users with their colleagues, because attorneys are far more likely to adopt new habits when the encouragement comes from someone who sits next to them (physically or virtually) every day than from a directive out of the innovation or IT departments.
Bloomberg Law’s own survey data backs this up: even among the largest firms, AI training completion averages 78% — meaning nearly a quarter of attorneys at even the biggest firms still haven’t been reached effectively. Buying the tool was never the hard part. Getting people to confidently and correctly use it is.
This is exactly the work Savvy Training & Consulting does every day.
We deliver live, human-led training — on-site, remote, or hybrid — built around how your attorneys and staff actually work, not a one-size-fits-all script. And through the SavvyAcademy LMS, our legal-specific learning management system platform powered by LearnUpon’s frontier AI tools, we extend that human-centered approach into scalable, on-demand learning your whole firm can access anytime.
If your firm is evaluating AI tools, rolling one out, or wondering why adoption has stalled, the data is clear: the technology was never the bottleneck. The training is.