AI in professional services: Hard but inevitable

Tom Grogan, our Chief Transformation Officer, examines what firms must understand – and unlearn – to stay relevant. 

This article was first published in the October 2025 issue of Business Brief. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will disrupt professional services, from law to Trust and Company Service Providers (TCSPs), at a pace and scale never seen before.

Most of the headlines being printed, pilots being run, and promises being made about AI in professional services, are nonsense.

These statements are both true. Professional services are complex and defy the false binary decisions we are so often presented with. But where does this complexity come from? The many complicating factors in this space include a fundamental misunderstanding of professional service firms' value propositions, the struggle to define and measure and demonstrate return on investment (ROI), and the "jagged frontier" of AI capabilities.

What do professional services firms actually do? 

I am routinely astonished by how poorly very senior professional service leaders understand their own organisations' value propositions.

I recently heard a former Magic Circle law firm Managing Partner worry aloud that "AI will mean clients no longer pay US$2,000 an hour for our precedents." The very notion that anyone in their right mind is paying those sorts of sums for access to precedents (beautifully formatted no doubt and with the most elegantly drafted indemnities you could ever feast your eyes on, I'm sure) is laughable. When I challenged him, we had a high-level discussion around some of the actual benefits clients value and "buy" (trust and reassurance and thought partnership were some of the warm fuzzy feeling-inducing words used; professional indemnity cover was no less true for its brutality). This discussion was however still too easy, too abstracted and vague to be translated to meaningful enterprise value.

Mourant is doing this properly. We're doing the very hard and nuanced (both by geography and practice areas across our global Group) exercise of uncovering what our actual value is and what our clients actually pay for, and then structure ourselves to do so in the best, most effective and most valuable way we can. This is what I'm excited to be a part of and push forward – it's hard and big but fun and incredibly rewarding. Stay tuned!

Measuring ROI within professional services

We have two major ROI-related challenges in professional services.

First, our data quality around tool usage is generally poor. Almost every organisation relies on unscalable anecdote and flawed self-reporting. There are tools out there that are helping to bridge our understanding gap, and we will obtain an outsized advantage in the coming years if we better understand how we spend time.

Second, there is a fundamental tension between saving time and a business model constructed on a billable time model. Senior leaders clinging to Jevons paradox – the economic effect that sees increased efficiency lead to an increase in demand as we saw when emails made communication instantaneous for example – are, I fear, deluding themselves. Re-wiring our organisations to deliver value in ways not intrinsically linked to time-spent will be key in the medium term.

The "jagged frontier" of AI

AI excels in some areas and struggles in others, creating a "jagged frontier" of capability. This makes AI transformation in professional services complex. No single AI tool can solve all problems. A deep understanding of a given organisation's activities is required to determine the right solutions and technologies.

Finally, I would remind readers that all the good solutions and thoughts they had "pre-AI" are still there. We mustn't walk around waving an AI hammer looking for nails. Rather, we should be focussed on our opportunities and threats content in the knowledge we have an increasingly powerful hammer in our back pocket if the need arises.