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FEATURE CROSS EXAMINED 12 www.canadianlawyermag.com FROM SIX-HOUR REVIEWS TO ONE Matthew Peters gives a ground-level account of AI adoption at McCarthy Tétrault – from deal work to hiring to vendor strategy THE HYPE around artificial intelligence in law is over. What has replaced it is messier, more consequential, and playing out right now inside Canadian law firms – in the drafting work that junior lawyers are no longer doing, in the strategic decisions firms are making about which legal technology vendors to trust, and in the new skills that managing partners are looking for when they hire. In a wide-ranging conversation with Canadian Lawyer, Matthew Peters, partner and national leader of transformation at McCarthy Tétrault LLP, gives an insider's account of what AI adoption actually looks like on the ground at one of Canada's largest firms. His overall picture is unambiguous: change is no longer theoretical. "This is no longer something coming; this is now here," Peters says. "You really need to lean into it." When Canadian Lawyer spoke with Peters for a 2017 cover story on AI in the legal profession, he warned firms not to get seduced by the hype and urged a focus on process improvement first. Eight years on, he says that advice has shifted. "I think that now I'd be more careful about using the hype as an excuse not to move quickly," he says. Lawyers, he notes, are naturally change-resistant – "we have this narrow psych profile that we all fit into and hate the idea of anything changing" – and that instinct to wait is no longer a defensible position. The pace of change has made that clear. Peters recently received an email from a lawyer at the firm, who was incredulous about what an AI tool had done during a term sheet review. What would have taken six hours took one. He says he gets an email like that "probably every other day from lawyers at the firm," describing a near-universal sense of amazement at the tools' current effectiveness. The gains aren't limited to speed. Peters also points to the ability to crawl internal data for market-position insights into deal terms and to run a quick quality check on work product before it leaves the firm, which can be helpful even if it improves the output only incrementally. The response at McCarthy Tétrault has been deliberate. The firm established a policy framework early – human-in-the-loop, security protocols, training requirements – and has since built its approach around workflows rather than tools. With lawyers in Canada now navigating Co-Counsel, Copilot, Legora, and Claude, among others, Peters says coherence matters. "You just have to understand and hang on to the workflow. Our job is to tell you the best tool for the best part, best prompts, best data," he says. That includes prompting partners to ask questions they wouldn't have thought to ask before: How was this work product generated? Were the relevant cases actually loaded? Was the output verified? That discipline extends to how the firm thinks about building versus buying. Peters is frank that jumping into tools without understanding their technical limits is a fast route to underperformance. His advice to other firms: ensure someone on the team is technically literate enough to know where "You just have to understand and hang on to the workflow. Our job is to tell you the best tool for the best part, best prompts, best data"