Lexpert magazine features articles and columns on developments in legal practice management, deals and lawsuits of interest in Canada, the law and business issues of interest to legal professionals and businesses that purchase legal services.
Issue link: https://digital.carswellmedia.com/i/1547047
FEATURE 8 www.canadianlawyermag.com CROSS EXAMINED Agility, she says, is structural. "As a smaller firm, we don't have lots of layers of decision-making." The firm can tailor a fee arrangement to a single client, decline a file on principle, or change course without clearing it through committees. " You can make decisions, and you can make decisions quickly," she says – an advantage she argues matters more in a market shifting almost daily. She has seen the opposite extreme up close. Since 2024, Speigel has co-chaired Ontario's Civil Rules Review with Justice Cary Boswell of the Superior Court of Justice, on a sweeping overhaul of the province's Rules of Civil Procedure. The group's final report, made public in December 2025, moderated several of its most contested proposals after consultation feedback. "From my recent experience with the civil rules, it's very hard to get lots of people to agree on any type of big decision," she says. "And the same holds true at a firm." On technology, Speigel is enthusiastic but unromantic. Spending on tools is easy; adoption is not. "Investing in technology is important. Then you have to get uptake, and the uptake has to … translate to efficiency," she says, noting that many lawyers never use the tools their firms buy. Her firm went fully paperless years before the pandemic and is now testing AI tools. She uses Westlaw's research AI and a paid version of ChatGPT to tighten her writing, not to draft. The harder lesson has been that "learning how to use AI is its own skill," she says – one that can be built only through practice. Even strong results leave her wanting more: she finds that, "even when the summary is totally correct" and free of hallucinations, "I still ended up wanting to go to the documents," because in litigation, a few words can change a case. The trade-offs echo accounts of how AI is reshaping day-to-day litigation work across the profession. The same Clio research found that 79 percent of US legal professionals now use AI in their work, and Canadian Lawyer's coverage of the report found that many clients are already putting their own legal questions to AI. The one place Speigel believes firms of any size leave value on the table is communication. She regularly inherits files where clients cannot say what stage they are at or what the strategy is. Telling clients where a matter stands, and why, builds trust that fee models alone cannot. "If you don't understand what somebody wants out of something or where they're trying to go … then you have no ability to be agile and address those needs," she says. "Investing in technology is important. Then you have to get uptake, and the uptake has to … translate to efficiency" AGILITY AS AN ADVANTAGE Allison Speigel will appear at the Canadian Legal Summit on a panel titled "The Size Advantage: How Agile Firms Are Winning in a Client- Driven Market," examining the following topics: How cultivating a culture of agility allows your firm to adapt to market disruptions faster than legacy competitors Ways to rethink your core value proposition to meet modern client expectations for transparency and strategic partnership Aligning your operations and technology investments to drive rapid responsiveness without sacrificing the bottom line Visit canadianlawyermag.com/ events for more information on the summit. This article is based on an episode of CL Talk, Canadian Lawyer's podcast. All episodes can be found at canadianlawyermag. com/cl-talk. The Canadian Legal Summit will take place on October 14 at the Carlu in Toronto. Visit canadianlawyermag.com/ events for more information.