AI is a historic opportunity for law firm antitrust teams

The rise of AI presents an unparalleled opportunity for antitrust teams in law firms to increase revenue, win new clients and offer new antitrust services to clients. Everyone knows AI tools are going to help lawyers with their work, but the more interesting question is how it can help competition law teams drive strategic objectives like increasing revenue and winning new clients. Here are some ways that antitrust teams in law firms can drive strategic objectives:

Leverage

Traditionally the law firm model has relied on law firm partners leveraging the work of human associates to increase revenue—the more associates they leverage the more profit for the firm. What if, in addition to human associates, the partners could also leverage AI agents? Software typically has much higher margins than professional services, so the increased leverage could also come with margin expansion.

New services to clients

AI enables totally new services to be provided that didn’t previously exist. Just like the enormous rise in FDI regimes has created a new service for competition lawyers to provide clients, AI offers the potential for new tools to create whole new revenue streams.

Reducing time spent on work that clients don’t pay for

Lawyers spend huge amounts of time on work that they can’t charge clients for, whether it’s work after a fee cap has been hit, work that gets written off or work that’s a freebie to win a bigger piece of work. That’s a massive inefficiency that makes partners look bad in internal accounting. If you can use AI to reduce time wasted on that, you can actually increase revenue per lawyer.

Offer a better service to clients

If you can use this insanely powerful technology better than your competitors then you can offer a way better service than them and win more work. You can’t do this if you’re using the same generic tool as everyone else. There’s a reason clients are including how you’re using AI in every RFP.

AI tools shouldn’t be just a piece of software that enables you to do some pieces of work a bit faster, they should be core tools to drive strategic objectives. But when it becomes strategic, your AI supplier isn’t just a software provider—it has to be a partner that deeply understands how your competition team operates. The AI tools also have to be meticulously focussed on the work that your competition team does; otherwise they won’t live up to their transformative potential for your firm.