What changed at ILTACon 2026, and what legal marketing leaders should bring to the executive committee instead of a number that will not survive scrutiny.
Halfway through a session on managing AI tool overload, Tim Fox, Chief Data and AI Officer at Ogletree Deakins, put a vendor-sponsored study on the screen claiming 400% return on a legal AI tool, then spent the next three minutes taking it apart in front of the room.
The researchers had surveyed people who use the product, applied their answers to a hypothetical 500-person firm, and extrapolated from there. There was no hostility in how he said it. Until he sees longitudinal data and actual billing records, he told the room, he has questions about any number built that way.
Nobody in the room argued with him.
That moment is the story of ILTACon 2026 for anyone who runs marketing at a law firm. Last year every speaker had an ROI figure. This year the most senior technology leaders in the industry stood on stage and said those figures are not real, and the room agreed with them.
When firm leadership asks for the ROI on an AI investment, marketing now has something better than a number. It has the industry’s own admission that the number does not exist yet, and a clearer sense of what to bring instead.
The most senior people in the room admitted they cannot answer the ROI question
The Thursday keynote brought together CIOs and data leaders from Norton Rose Fulbright, Foley Hoag, Foley & Lardner, and Robinson+Cole to report back from the closed-door sessions reserved for the largest firms. What came out of it was an unusually plain accounting of where the money is going.
Alexis Collins, CIO at Norton Rose Fulbright, said everyone is measuring adoption rather than dollars. Her own honest summary was that a task now takes hours instead of days, and she could not say whether the firm is earning more or spending less.
The panel had a phrase for the pressure everyone is under to produce a figure anyway. They called it the tyranny of ROI.
“Adoption is table stakes. But adoption doesn’t give you ROI.”
Axel Koelsch, COO at Lawfront, went further and argued that spending 500 hours calculating an ROI figure produces a meaningless data point in a market moving this fast. He offered a simpler test. If the firm would not be better off dropping AI tomorrow, the exact percentage does not matter.
That line is a relief to hear and a trap to repeat. A CMO cannot walk into an executive committee meeting and say the industry has decided not to measure. The move available to marketing leadership is a smaller number that holds up under questioning, because a partner will do to a marketing figure exactly what Fox did to the 400% study.
What to do now: Replace the ROI slide with two things: a monthly report of who is using which tool, broken out by practice group, and one task the team has actually timed before and after. It looks modest on a slide, but it holds up when a partner starts pulling at it.
The savings are real for the person but invisible on the firm’s books
There is a structural reason the number never materializes, and it was explained more clearly this year than our By Aries team has heard it explained anywhere else.
A lawyer who used to spend eight hours on a task and now spends two does not hand back the other six. They fill them with something else. The time savings are completely real at the individual level, and they disappear into the noise at firm scale.
This is why optimistic studies and skeptical ones end up agreeing on the trend, even when they disagree on the math. The gain shows up as capacity rather than cost. People do more work, and the cost line barely moves.
Marketing lives at the sharp end of this. Marketing teams are not billing hours, so nothing in the work produces a natural savings figure. When a coordinator drafts an award submission in forty minutes instead of four hours, that time goes straight back into a request queue that was already too long.
The gain is real with AI, but it shows up nowhere.
This may be difficult to say to leadership that expects a real number. But saying it plainly and explaining that the firm is not alone builds more credibility than an abstract percentage that likely isn’t even accurate.
What to do now: Pick one workflow the team runs constantly, whether that is RFP triage, award submissions, or client alerts. Time it honestly, once before and once after, with the person who actually does the work. One measured task a marketing leader can describe from start to finish beats a modeled figure built by somebody else.
The tough truth: the most honest conversation about AI money happened without marketing in the room
That conversation happened among CIOs, chief data officers, and one private equity-backed COO. Marketing was excluded, and marketing was not in the closed-door sessions that fed it either.
The discussions in those rooms directly affect marketing budgets, but no one from marketing was there to voice the team’s position.
Fox told his session that legal tech spending grew close to 10% in a single year and that the firms he compares notes with are settling around 1% of revenue as their generative AI cost. He was careful to call the second figure what it is, a number circulating among peers rather than published research, and we would treat it the same way.
Ana Toft-Nielsen at Greenberg Traurig described the newer complication: pricing is shifting from a flat per-person license to consumption-based pricing, where the bill rises with usage. One speaker had already hit a monthly limit on day two and faced a bill roughly ten times what she expected.
At By Aries, we regularly hear from marketers who reach their Copilot limits well before the end of the month. The people who would otherwise use AI to build the next phase of the firm’s AI-enabled marketing start treating it as a waste of time because, when the tool stops mid-workflow, there is no reason to go back and try again. The work still has to get done.
Consumption pricing changes the character of the conversation law firm leaders are having. Every campaign built on an AI tool and every workflow a team is encouraged to adopt now carries a variable cost that scales with adoption success. When usage rises, spend rises with it, and the person asked to explain that will not be the CIO.
The panel offered a warning about this from outside legal. Amazon incentivized employees on how much AI they used; people started running everything through it, including tasks where it added nothing, and the program was shut down. Usage is easy to grow and easy to mistake for value.
Two other things surfaced in these rooms that should be brought to the attention of marketing leadership. Governance came up repeatedly as the thing that accelerates a firm rather than slows it because the data problem, not the model, is what stalls most projects. And on the client side, CIOs tracked how client questions have moved through three stages: a couple of years ago, clients wanted to know whether a firm was using AI and what it was using; now they ask how else it could be used to serve them. That last question lands on marketing, not IT.
What to do now: Before the next renewal cycle, list every marketing tool the firm pays for on one line, with what each is actually used for, and duplicated spend will surface quickly. Then email every AI vendor in use and ask, in writing, what the bill would look like if usage tripled. Both documents should be in front of whoever owns the firm’s AI budget, and together they are why marketing should be in that conversation.
Being in the room matters more than the number brought to it
The firms that come through the next two years well will be the ones where marketing was in the room when spending, tooling, and measurement were decided. The quality of the ROI deck will have very little to do with it.
Right now, at most firms, marketing is not in that room. The AI strategy runs through IT, innovation, or knowledge management and the practice side; marketing is told to adopt after the tools have been chosen, and the training is built around attorney workflows. Then someone asks marketing to prove the return on decisions it had no part in making.
We’d recommend three moves to bring marketing into the room where these decisions are being made.
- Time one real task, so the measurement belongs to marketing and nobody can dismantle it.
- Bring leadership the smaller, defensible number instead of the impressive one.
- Take the tool inventory and the vendor answers into the firm’s AI budget discussion because that is where next year’s justification gets set.
The struggle to prove AI ROI is a distraction, not a failure. As the industry’s most senior technologists have admitted, that number remains unknown. For the CMO, this is an opening to pivot from the “tyranny of ROI” to a more defensible strategy: lead with measurable task capacity, transparent tool inventory, and the firm’s evolving service model. The leaders who succeed will be the ones who replace the request for a fictional percentage with a clear map of how AI is actually changing the work.
Managing the intersection of AI capability and operational efficiency requires more than just tool adoption; it demands a fundamental shift in workflow design. By Aries partners with legal marketing leadership to audit existing tech stacks, align generative AI with firm goals, and ensure marketing is a core architect of the firm’s AI strategy. If you are preparing for your next budget cycle and want to move beyond the ROI debate, we invite you to connect with us.
