Legal AI adoption has moved quickly from a side project to a change-management priority for law firms. A 2026 industry report found that legal AI use more than doubled year over year — a clear signal...
TODD FRIEDLICH, DIRECTOR OF AI & INNOVATION, WILLKIE On AI adoption, grounded legal content, and the future of legal technology Spring 2026 | NYC Trust in legal AI is becoming a defining factor...
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...
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TODD FRIEDLICH, DIRECTOR OF AI & INNOVATION, WILLKIE On AI adoption, grounded legal content, and the future of legal technology
Spring 2026 | NYC
Trust in legal AI is becoming a defining factor in how law firms evaluate and adopt new technology. As generative AI capabilities continue to evolve, firms are looking beyond innovation alone and focusing on the elements that build confidence in AI-powered tools, including security, grounded legal content, transparent citations, and human oversight. In this conversation, Todd Friedlich, Director of AI & Innovation at Willkie, discusses how the firm approaches AI adoption and why trust remains the foundation of every legal AI initiative.
1. You’ve been in legal technology for more than 20 years. How did you get your start, and what kept you in the field? I’ve always been a technologist at heart. Since my earliest days, I have been building computers and teaching myself programming languages. When I joined a large law firm in early 2000, I started to see there were tremendous inefficiencies in the way information from past matters was captured. That was the very early days of knowledge management in the U.S. So, we started building precedent library systems, and that caused something to click for me. We could provide significant value to attorneys and staff by simplifying the process of capturing information upfront and giving them a much better experience retrieving it later, which would ultimately lead to greater insights being pulled from that information.
From there I continued building applications, really concentrating on the knowledge management side. As the years went on, a lot of that work started being viewed more as innovation. It is not just about surfacing information for the attorneys. There are many processes and day-to-day tasks that can be automated or optimized using technology.
2. At Willkie you lead both the strategy side and the technology education and adoption programs. Why is it important for someone in your role to be involved in both?
Innovation without adoption is really just theory. We can buy and build the most incredible tools imaginable, but if the attorneys and staff are not using them, it is just a waste of time and money. What we found is that the proper way to get these tools in the hands of people is to work closely with them on identifying what the needs are. That is the innovation side. Then you get out there and show everyone what the capabilities are.
Training people on AI-based tools is honestly a lot more important than typical technology training. If you do not know exactly how to create bullet points in Word, it is not going to be the end of the world. But when you are using generative AI tools and you are not grounding properly or prompting correctly, you are going to end up with hallucinations or just incorrect information. So, at Willkie we have merged the innovation group with the training and adoption group.
3. How does Willkie approach staying current with technology when the market is moving so fast? How do you balance the bleeding edge with managing risk?
We have been deliberate about AI at Willkie. The value was obvious early on, but the first wave of tools was still working through its version-one problems. Rather than put unproven products in front of our attorneys, we used that window to build our own foundation and get clear on where the real value was and where the risk sat. When we started to integrate outside tools, the technology had matured and we knew exactly how we wanted to use it.
What we did first was start building our own infrastructure around AI. We built our orchestration layer, what we call Wendell Intelligence, which is our internal AI platform. We did that initial groundwork and then started partnering with vendors once the market stabilized. That allowed us to provide tools to our attorneys early on without locking ourselves into any one vendor. And fortunately, I am not the only person looking at this. We have a wonderful team in IT and across the entire firm. Partners and staff are constantly reviewing products and bubbling that up to leadership.
4. What are the most important characteristics your team looks for when evaluating technology partners?
Security is going to be the most pivotal aspect of any technology we implement. If the technology is not secure, the conversation does not need to continue. Beyond that, it is eagerness to partner. We never want to just buy a bunch of products and throw them at our attorneys. We're going to invest a significant amount of time, energy, and money in driving adoption and getting people excited about these tools and integrating them into our stack. We want to make sure that we are finding the best possible partners.
From my experience, what works best has always been solutions that get us 80 percent of the way there but give us the option through APIs to integrate into our stack and really get to that bespoke solution.
5. Willkie recently upgraded to Lexis+ with Protégé. What drove that decision, and how does it fit into the firm’s broader technology strategy?
Our attorneys have long been fans of the entire Lexis platform. So, when the opportunity arose to partner with Lexis on the integration of the Protégé APIs and the full Lexis+ stack, we saw tremendous potential. We see Wendell Intelligence as a true orchestration layer, and we see great opportunity in integrating our Wendell chatbot with the Protégé APIs. Wendell can determine that legal data is required and then route the request to Protégé, letting Protégé determine which source from within the entire Lexis platform is the best tool to answer that question. It gives us the freedom to route to Lexis when we want to, or route elsewhere when the need arises.
6. Grounding data has been central to Willkie’s AI philosophy. Can you explain why that matters and how it shapes the tools you adopt? Grounding the data within our generative AI tools is of the utmost importance to the firm. It is how we ensure our answers are based on current law and on the authoritative sources we have identified. Just like we would not want attorneys providing legal insight based on something they randomly found on the internet, we would not want them using a commercial AI tool to get an answer from wherever it happened to find it.
We tell our attorneys every time we do a demo or a workshop that they need to make sure every answer they receive has a citation they can click through and review the underlying documents and source, and vet the accuracy of the information themselves. Tools like Lexis+ with Protégé make that much easier. 7. How does having Protégé integrated into Willkie’s workflow change the day-to-day experience for attorneys? By ensuring our attorneys have access to tools like Lexis+ with Protégé, we can simplify the process of exposing grounded information to them. We are no longer requiring them to go to separate data systems and gather that information and then enter it into some other AI tool to get an answer. By integrating the generative AI aspects of grounded legal research, we are able to ensure they have access to the best information at the right time.
8. There is a lot of market interest in AI workflows right now. What do workflows mean to you in practice, and how is Willkie looking to use them? Generative AI tools are fantastic for answering questions and simplifying tasks, but there is a huge variation in people’s level of comfort and expertise with using them. The way you word a question in a tool like Protégé greatly impacts the quality of the answer, the sources it uses, and the accuracy of what you get. By using workflows, we are able to build out best-practice processes. For due diligence, for example, we can define how Willkie says that review should be done. The end user uploads the relevant documents, provides the key pieces of information, and gets their output in a format the firm has already signed off on. Someone has worked through all of those prompts and all of that formatting ahead of time. So, the attorney can spend their time adding the real value, the analysis on top of the output, rather than fine-tuning their prompt over and over again.
9. Can you give us another example of where workflows are creating real value for attorneys at Willkie? Our litigation teams are eager to use workflows to automate the analysis of depositions and court transcripts, to find opportunities during cross-examination. There is great value in being able to standardize the way that analysis is done without requiring attorneys to spend all of their time thinking about how they prompt or making sure the underlying documents are available. Through properly created workflows, we are able to ensure they are using the appropriate grounded sources and not just whatever they happened to have on hand.
10. You have spoken about the importance of keeping legal technology human-centered. What does that mean in practice at Willkie? Nobody is looking to replace all lawyers with small robots. We are looking to provide solutions that make attorneys’ and staff’s lives better while providing greater insights to our clients. We have been able to identify automated workflows that actually improve the quality of life for our associates and our partners. It is not just about saying, here is a tool to automate a document. It is about finding the tasks that provide no joy and do not deliver significant value to clients and building processes that make those better.
These tools work best when we are working directly with the attorneys to figure out how they can best take advantage of them. That is why we have so many in-person adoption events. We want to sit down with the teams, understand where their problems are, and make sure they are well educated on our capabilities.
11. Where do you see the real ROI with legal AI? What does that look like for Willkie? The real return on investment moves beyond using AI as an assistant and toward AI as a partner, as a colleague. Someone who simultaneously knows way more than you and way less than you, someone you can bounce ideas off of. That all works well on its own, but it gets to a whole other level when you have a secure way to access client information alongside current legal information.
I can suggest ideas, see where the AI takes me, and then verify it. I am still the human in the loop with my lifetime of experience, but I can use AI as a sounding board to find new opportunities and new pathways.
12. Looking ahead, what are you most excited about as you continue to evolve Willkie’s AI strategy? One thing my team has been working on quite a bit is an extension of the Wendell Intelligence platform we are calling Wendell Legal Signal. Rather than waiting for an attorney to go in and ask a question, Wendell Legal Signal goes against a large set of public and private data sources and tries to determine opportunities or incoming legislation, or various things that might impact our clients or just the industry at large. It then alerts our internal teams so they can reach out to clients more proactively.
It has already produced great results around potential class action suits and legislative changes that will impact our clients and allows us to really reach out proactively. I am also very excited about the potential of integrating the Protégé APIs into that platform, so we have an even more robust set of data sources available and increase the likelihood that we will pick up on the right signals. At the end of the day, this is not about business development. It is about improving our relationship with our clients and making sure our attorneys and clients are aware of anything in the world that might be impacting them.