Over the past year, we sat down with risk and compliance leaders at firms across the country in a series of roundtables, and four key themes emerged. Most firms recognize the first three — and the fourth is moving so fast that most don’t even have a governance owner for it yet.
Lateral clearance speed is now a recruiting variable, not just an operational one
The typical Am Law firm takes weeks to fully onboard a lateral. During that window, the attorney isn’t billing because conflicts clearance is still pending. Multiply that by the billing rate of a senior associate or partner, and the cost of a slow process quickly becomes clear.
Speed matters in the counteroffer window. A rival firm that can extend a hard offer three days faster has a real advantage, and laterals are paying attention. The onboarding experience has become part of the pitch, whether your firm currently treats it that way or not.
Lateral management ranked as a top investment priority in nearly every conversation. That means moving away from forms and email chains and upgrading to structured, coordinated onboarding that gives incoming laterals the tools to build their book of business on day one. That’s the competitive bar now.
Firms that have closed that gap report a concrete payoff: When onboarding runs smoothly and follow-up feels coordinated, laterals say it reinforces their decision to join. In a market where you’re competing for the same handful of top talent, that signal carries weight.
“Grow without additional headcount” is now a board-level mandate
The directive has changed. It used to be vague: “Do more with what you have.” Now it’s more specific: “Automate the work that doesn’t require human judgment, so the people who exercise judgment aren’t spend their valuable time on it.”
One firm described directing 70% of its total technology budget to AI and security. That’s not an experiment — that’s reallocation. And it tracks with what we hear consistently: Operational excellence ranks first, or tied for first, as the area firms most want to invest in to improve.
Conflicts screening is the clearest example. It’s high-volume, rule-bound, and expensive when done manually at scale. Professionals managing 8–10% matter volume growth year over year, yet getting no increase in analyst headcount, aren’t asking whether AI belongs in conflicts review. They’re asking why it isn’t fully deployed yet.
Automating volume also lets firms grow without triggering a headcount conversation, making it an easier internal ask. Firms that haven’t built a clear case for this yet are already a budget cycle behind.
A failed conflicts check can cost more than fees
The risk in client intake isn’t usually the obvious conflict. It’s the one with no single data source: a competitor relationship, a reputational issue, or a financial exposure — each invisible if you only look in one place. Professionals described actively seeking second-source validation, because a single source — however thorough — is structurally incomplete.
The scenario that produces the most anxiety: A matter opens cleanly, and the liability surfaces only after significant work-in-progress has accumulated. By that point, you’re managing a disengagement while handling exposure on fees that are already earned and potentially unrecoverable.
Some firms are addressing this through automated integrations that pull third-party data directly into the intake workflow, surfacing competitive conflicts and reputational flags before commitment. Others are starting to treat due diligence data as a business development asset — a byproduct of doing the work well that also happens to be useful for relationship strategy. That dual-use case changes how firms think about the investment.
Your OCGs already contain AI obligations your firm may not be tracking
The OCG pain firms already know is concrete: billing write-downs from non-compliant time entries, marketing restrictions that surface only after a pitch has gone out, and staffing guidelines that partners ignore until a client raises it. These aren’t edge cases. They’re recurring friction points that most firms still manage reactively. AI restrictions are the newest layer on top of that problem, and most firms don’t have a designated owner for any of it.
Clients are now embedding AI-specific restrictions directly into their OCGs: which tools can be used on their matters, how AI-assisted work can be billed, and what disclosure is required. A firm can be fully compliant with everything it agreed to two years ago and still be out of compliance with what the same client expects today, because terms can change without any systematic way to track them.
The AI layer compounds all of it. The question is no longer just whether the time entry was compliant. It now extends to whether the attorney used a tool the client prohibits, at a rate the client doesn’t recognize, without the disclosure the client requires.
The exposure compounds quickly. Laterals bring client relationships governed by AI terms that your intake process may not capture. Efficiency initiatives run into the same wall. Most firms don’t have a designated owner for this. In roundtables, the reaction was recognition, not skepticism. Firms know this is a problem; they just don’t know whose problem it is.
Where to go from here
Lateral intake, operational efficiency, client due diligence, and OCG compliance all run through the same underlying infrastructure — or at least they should. The firms furthest ahead aren’t solving each challenge separately; they’re building toward a connected approach and moving faster because of it.
We’ve built a resource center around these four areas, with content tied to each challenge. If you’re working through any of them, the Compliance Migration Acceleration Program is the fastest path to a plan you can take to leadership at no cost to your firm.
If your firm is working through any of these challenges, schedule a conversation with our team to talk through what that looks like in practice.