Here’s what we know: 80% of legal teams are using generative AI according to ILTA’s 2025 Technology Survey. That’s impressive adoption for a technology that barely existed two years ago. But now, as we enter the era of agentic AI, legal teams are being asked to rethink everything again.
The question isn’t whether agentic AI will change legal work. It’s whether firms will change how they adopt technology. Successful adoption requires both well-designed technology and robust people-centered strategies. You can’t technology your way out of habit formation challenges, and you can’t adoption-strategy your way out of poorly designed tools. Most organizations are investing heavily in one while underinvesting in the other.
Why Habits-Not Technology-Determine Adoption
I’ve spent my career studying how people adopt new ways of working, and I’ve learned that technology transformations fail when we treat them as technology problems. The legal industry is about to make that mistake again with agentic AI, investing in sophisticated orchestration platforms while ignoring the basic psychology of habit formation. We’re solving for capability when the real bottleneck is adoption, and most AI adoption strategies don’t plan for abandonment.
Forming a new habit or way of working takes time and repetition. Behavioral science tells us most humans fail when trying to start a new habit, not because they lack capability or commitment, but because habits require sustained practice before they become routine. And when people stumble, which they will, they need structured support to restart.
Research from Prosci shows that projects with excellent change management are seven times more likely to succeed—proof that the people side isn’t optional. But most firms roll out AI tools with a pilot group, a training session, a Slack channel, and the best of intentions. Then six months later, they’re puzzled when usage metrics flatline. The technology didn’t fail. The adoption design did.
Designing for Adoption: Expect the Dip, Build the Restart
If you’re serious about adoption, here’s what you need to build into your strategy—not after tools fail, but from day one:
Expect the dip: Usage typically drops 30-40% after the initial excitement. Build that into your timeline and communicate it upfront so teams don’t interpret the dip as failure.
Create restart rituals: Monthly “office hours” where someone coaches lawyers through their actual work using the tool. Not generic demos, real-time problem-solving with their documents, their clients, their workflow friction points.
Showcase wins: Establish a regular forum-lunch-and-learns, showcase sessions, or a win-room channel—where early adopters share what they’re accomplishing with the tool. Not generic success stories, but specific: “Here’s how I used it to catch a critical disclosure error” or “Here’s how it saved me 3 hours on this negotiation.” Make visible progress contagious. People adopt faster when they see peers solving real problems.
Normalize stopping and starting: Send a focused message three months in: “If you aren’t still using a new tool to your advantage, here’s how to restart.” Give permission to be inefficient to allow people to relearn.
Track abandonment as a success metric: If you’re not measuring who stops using tools and why, you’re not serious about adoption. The restart data is more valuable than the initial adoption data.
These restart strategies are critical, but they work best when embedded in a broader readiness approach.
Strategic Readiness for Legal Leaders
To prepare for the agentic era, legal leaders should focus on readiness, not hype. Here’s what that actually means:
Start with the problem and your skeptics. Before evaluating any tool, identify the specific problem you’re solving, and involve your skeptics in defining it. These are the respected practitioners who won’t adopt until they see real value. When they help identify the problem, they’re invested in finding a solution. Adoption fails when it’s done to people rather than with them. Your skeptics will ask the hard questions that prevent expensive failures later.
Name what’s being lost, not just gained. People resist change when they can’t articulate what they’re giving up. Be explicit: “Yes, this changes how you work. You’ll spend less time hunting for precedents and more time applying judgment to complex negotiations. That means learning new workflows during your busiest quarter. Here’s how we’re supporting that.”
Create psychological safety for the learning curve. Agentic AI isn’t always intuitive. Teams need explicit permission to be inefficient while they learn, or they’ll abandon tools at the first frustration. Build “protected practice time” into billable hour expectations for the first 90 days.
Choose the right workflows and fix broken processes first. Target high-impact areas where complexity meets volume—but only where teams have capacity to learn. Don’t pilot AI on your most time-pressured process. And if your data is inconsistent or your systems don’t talk to each other, pause the AI conversation entirely. Agentic systems amplify good processes and expose broken ones, they don’t fix them.
Define success metrics beyond time saved. Track error reduction, negotiation speed, surfaced risks, and abandonment/restart rates. The adoption journey matters as much as the efficiency gains.
Establish governance frameworks with auditability, traceability, and clear human-in-the-loop controls. This isn’t red tape; it’s the foundation that allows teams to experiment safely.
The Path Forward
The future of legal work won’t be defined by who adopts AI first, but by who adopts it wisely. And wisdom, in this case, means understanding that technology transformation is fundamentally a human transformation, one that requires patience, support, and planned restarts when people inevitably stumble.
The question isn’t whether agentic AI will change legal work. It’s whether your firm will change how it adopts technology.
Ready to see technology designed with adoption in mind? Learn more about Litera One and Lito and Lito or Schedule a demo today.
The post The Missing Piece In Agentic AI: Shape The Habits That Power Real Adoption appeared first on Above the Law.