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16 www.canadianlawyermag.com OPINION UPFRONT The new unit of excellence When every firm has deployed AI, differentiation will come from capturing what people and technology produce together nology but the institutional discipline that made the knowledge capturable in the first place. Taxonomies, debrief practices, and the cultural expectation that partners contribute what they learned as a professional norm. The equivalent for law firms is a propri- etary institutional memory of the firm's own human−AI collaboration work. Concretely, every significant matter produces a captured record of how the lawyer reasoned through it with AI, what they used AI for, where they overrode the model, and what they learned, structured so it accumulates. A mid-level lawyer working on a novel problem can query it and pull not just precedents but also the compressed collaborative thinking of the partners they aspire to become. This cannot be replicated by buying tools. The library of a firm's own compounded collaboration prac- tice is the differentiator. This is the graduation of knowledge management for the AI era. It also forces a structural change. Senior partners have long been incentivized to keep expertise proprietary because their books of business depended on it. Asking them to contribute their collabora- tion patterns to a firm-wide repository requires a change to partnership economics. Possibly, a model that ties compensation to contribution, not just origination. Firms and legal departments that start to think this way will build something structur- ally powerful and sustainable. AI-amplified individual talent is not the final unit of excel- lence. The final unit is the combined human− AI offering that is proactively refined by the most talented individuals, captured by the firm at scale, and made available to everyone. The firms that build this now will lead institu- tional excellence in the next era. Jonathan Leibtag is assistant general counsel at Microsoft, leading lawyers across the Americas on commercial cloud, AI, and digital transformation deals. He previously practised M&A at a Toronto law firm. IN A FEW years, every major law firm will have deployed roughly the same AI stack. AI capability will no longer differentiate, and the current conversation about which firms are ahead in AI will feel dated. What will separate firms is what they build around what they bought. AI equalizes access to capability. Every major firm can buy the same tools, so AI-assisted execution will soon be roughly equivalent across the market. But equal access does not produce equal outcomes. What people do with that access varies enormously, and AI makes those variations consequential. In an era of equalized tools, the differences in how people use them become the source of advantage. I have previously argued that judgment is the new differentiator in the AI era, but we have not defined what judgment entails. The individual-level answer is the tacit work of a senior lawyer: the reads and situational awareness, the compression of information, the trust built across years. But individual excellence is now inseparable from how the individual works with AI. The way a senior lawyer works with AI produces something that is neither purely human nor purely technological. It is a combined offering. Their reads, judgment, and framing of the problem are one input; AI's pattern recogni- tion, recall, and drafting are another. The way an experienced lawyer weaves those inputs together, iteratively refined across numerous matters, becomes a human−AI collaboration model that produces outcomes neither the lawyer nor the AI alone could produce. I see this in my work. AI produces a first pass of a commercial framework. What moves a deal, though, isn't the draft but the decisions, informed by experience and tacit knowledge, about which clauses to reject, which to reframe, and how to compress the whole thing into three sentences the busi- ness sponsor could act on. And this iterative AI−human collaboration can become a firm's most valuable asset. Which raises an important question. What happens to that combined offering when a lawyer leaves? In the "pre-AI" era, the loss of a senior partner meant losing a book of busi- ness. In this one, it means losing a collabo- ration model that takes significant time and trial and error to build and cannot be repli- cated unless captured through a process. Systems for capturing expertise were built for the previous era, when a document or prece- dent sufficed. What needs to be captured now is not just what a lawyer produced but also how they thought through the work. Elite consulting firms have figured this out. A junior consultant working on a problem can retrieve the compressed thinking of anyone in the firm who has worked on some- thing similar – contextual knowledge that grows as new engagements yield new insights. What made this possible wasn't the tech- The way a senior lawyer works with AI produces something that is neither purely human nor purely technological