Benefits of AI in Legal Practice for Law Firms: A Q&A with Schenck Price

Artificial intelligence is transforming legal practice, helping law firms improve efficiency, strengthen client service, and streamline everyday workflows. As firms look to gain a competitive advantage, many are investing in legal AI tools that enhance productivity while supporting accuracy and professional responsibility.

In this Q&A, John Ursin, Managing Partner at Schenck Price, shares how the firm is approaching AI adoption, evaluating technology partners, and using legal AI to deliver greater value to attorneys and clients.

Key Takeaways

• Legal AI is helping firms improve efficiency, enhance client service, and compete more effectively without significantly increasing overhead.
• Trust remains the most important factor when evaluating legal AI technology, particularly regarding security, compliance, and protection of client information.
• AI enables attorneys to focus more on analysis, communication, and client outcomes by automating repetitive tasks and streamlining workflows.
• Grounded legal content and trusted research sources are essential for ensuring accuracy, verifiability, and professional responsibility.
• Successful AI adoption requires tailored training, smart integration into daily workflows, and ongoing tech support.
• Firms that embrace legal AI strategically can deliver higher-quality work product while maintaining strong client relationships and market competitiveness. 

First, we’d love to learn more about you and your legal practice. Not only are you Managing Partner at Schenck Price, but you are a corporate attorney with extensive litigation experience — something that's truly rare in the practice of law. How did you become such a multi-faceted legal practitioner? What role are you enjoying most these days?

My practice has evolved over the course of my legal career. For a long time, I had a general practice with a focus on litigation. I am now predominately a Corporate Attorney who uses my past litigation experience to counsel my clients based upon my past experience.  I did enjoy the competitiveness of litigation, but I really thought my strength was my ability to view the dispute in business terms. I was certainly always good at reading people, whether that was opposing counsel, witnesses, judges or a jury. I was often frustrated by the inefficiency of litigation. Later in my career my focus on the big picture of my clients’ businesses led me more to the corporate side of law. 

These days I clearly serve in two different roles. As the leader of the law firm, I am very focused on the legal services that we deliver to our clients but equally involved in the details of how our business functions. In my practice, I try to understand my clients’ businesses on a very personal and operational level. I find that the depth of my relationships allows me to give better counsel. I do enjoy the role I have with my clients as trusted advisor on many levels. I also enjoy the variety of our clients and their businesses. It certainly keeps everyday interesting. 

What are the key differentiators that set Schenck Price apart from competitors in an increasingly shifting legal market, especially where you’re based in New Jersey and the greater NYC area?

Schenck Price’s competitive advantage as a mid-size law firm lies in its strong culture and our focus on a longer time horizon.  In order to deliver the high level of legal services that we expect, Schenck Price needs to be a great place to work, filled with good people motivated by a common cause.  This directly informs our recruiting efforts — to hire the right attorneys and staff — who will fit in with our culture while being motivated to achieve excellence.  We provide our attorney with the right tools and strong connections to our business network and the local community.

The NJ/NY Metro market is highly competitive.  Firms around us are merging and being acquired by Nationals and growing into much larger enterprises, but in the shifting sands of the legal market we are not going to lose sight of our mission — to deliver first class legal services efficiently.  Our strategy is to grow as a strong suburban regional firm where we can offer a much better value proposition to our clients than firms with much larger overhead.

Schenck Price is investing heavily in its AI strategy; it’s integration and adoption of AI tech is yet another competitive advantage for the firm. Why is it imperative you equip your attorneys with AI to do their jobs better, not just faster? How does AI help you transform your ways of working so you can compete with larger firms?

We cannot compete and deliver without the right tools. Our firm is investing heavily in the integration and adoption of legal AI technology. We are committed to delivering the highest level of legal services.  AI is a central focus. It is making us better lawyers who can serve our clients more efficiently. It is on our minds every day.  AI — If a firm is not using it, they are simply ignoring a tremendous resource, which has to impact their clients negatively.

We want to compete for clients at very high and sophisticated levels without unnecessarily increasing our overhead. AI allows us, as a 100-attorney firm, to provide services more like a firm double our size — using AI to amplify our talent and relationships.

AI is not about doing things faster or saving time. It allows us to focus on precision analysis and deliver more comprehensive communication to the client. Ultimately, it is the key to a better work product and better results. It is also now clear that Clients are expecting us to use AI for their benefit. They are also sometimes reviewing our work using AI. The ability to automate certain work increases our efficiency so the focus is more on client service, communication and results.

There’s a wide range of service providers in the legal tech space. What is most important to Schenck Price when choosing where to invest resources? What are the top characteristics you look for in a tech partner?

When it comes to choosing where to invest our resources in the tech space, it boils down to one word — Trust. The market is flooded with legal AI companies who make many promises.  We needed to partner with LexisNexis due to its unmatched relationship with the legal sector and its long track record of providing the very best in legal research tools. AI is a natural extension of our existing relationship. Our first concern is protecting our attorney client communication and work product. We trust that the LexisNexis platform allows us to access AI in compliance with all regulations and standards. LexisNexis stands alone in it that it is accepted by many thousands of law firms and the judiciary. 

We also know that legal AI is evolving fast. We could not risk partnering with a provider that cannot keep up and whose products might be obsolete in 6 months. We trust that LexisNexis has the resources and commitment to stay at the front of the pack for many years to come. 

We truly are proud of our partnership with Schenk Price and working alongside you on your tech strategy. From your perspective, what are some of the most productive and beneficial aspects of the firm’s partnership with LexisNexis? 

At the rate at which legal tech is advancing, it's simply not efficient for firms to develop internal training. LexisNexis offers a product that’s evolving right in front of our eyes; it continually adapts to what our Lawyers need to work smarter and more efficiently. LexisNexis provided us with initial sessions of general training as expected but is now providing practice-specific training for small groups that have been very effective. We keep asking for more from LexisNexis and they keep delivering without hesitation. Their training has accelerated the usage of the product. If you’re not partnering with Lexis and using Lexis+ with Protégé, you’re simply making a mistake.

When Schenck Price chooses AI tools, how important is the underlying content and grounding data? Describe your firm standards for verifiability and trustworthiness.

Every day, you read a new report in a legal periodical where an attorney is either in trouble with a court or has an ethical issue as a result of improper use of AI or using an untrustworthy system. We simply cannot take any risks with our attorneys’ professional reputation and our clients’ outcomes — it is another reason that the only choice for us was LexisNexis.

As you know, LexisNexis started out as a research and content provider. But our range of solutions has grown quickly, particularly into the AI space. We pride ourselves on providing a private, secure, connected and trusted ecosystem of diverse, integrated solutions. Can you talk about the advantage of that versatility when it comes to aligning with the way your people work?

I really think that LexisNexis has a multiple-decade head start over other providers. They completely understand how attorneys interact with research and documents. This has allowed the Protégé product to work seamlessly between legal content, client communication, drafting documents, and using a firm’s own document library.

LexisNexis is introducing workflows through its Protégé legal AI assistant. These structured, repeatable processes will help legal teams work more efficiently with AI to streamline more common tasks. Which aspects of workflows are you most excited about integrating at Schenck Price?

Processes that require investment of time to produce a similar set of documents are at the core of inefficiency. Eliminating the need to repeat the same drafting over and over again through workflows allows attorneys and support staff to focus on details and produce better work product without expending more time. This is the efficiency that serves our clients better and allows us to compete and succeed in our very competitive NJ/NY metro market.

At the end of the day, what matters most is how we help you deliver greater value to your attorney teams and your clients. Can you share some of the lead ways LexisNexis is helping you accelerate business and provide exceptional service?

Our attorneys trust LexisNexis, so there is no hesitation to use the product and integrate it into our daily work. Once you trust the product, then we need coaching to integrate AI into our daily tasks. The LexisNexis staff has been there to answer questions and for all the follow-up training we have needed.

What’s next for Schenck Price in the legal tech space? What’s getting you excited?

Listen, I would be excited to worry less about keeping up with the evolution and integration of AI. It is not an exaggeration to say that our partnership with Lexis Nexis has allowed me to sleep better. I know we have a great tool and have the resources to implement it in a way that is very beneficial to our clients. I am excited to see how our investment in AI will help us maintain our position to compete in both a competitive and the quickly evolving legal market – with AI, I believe that we can continue to grow as a suburban, regional mid-size firm delivering great legal services efficiently to our clients while maintaining our cultural identity.