By the time the coffee cooled at the Alternative Legal Leaders Forum, one thing was obvious: no one in the room wanted another slide deck about “the promise of AI.” They wanted to know what actually worked for real clients, real lawyers, real hours billed, etc. 

Firms are experimenting, cautiously, sometimes brilliantly, and sometimes blindly. One managing partner described their marketing team’s use of AI to generate referrals via Claude; another talked about using it to project market shifts. HR directors were even asking AI to help with appraisals and coaching. The tools were clever, yes. But clever isn’t the same as valuable. 

On one of the discussion panels, a Managing partner said, “We may not have a universal understanding of AI, but we do understand our business and our clients. That’s where we start and where we will find the use cases.” It was the sound of a profession recalibrating. 

The question dominating the Forum wasn’t Can we use AI? It was Why should we? 

Law firms are famously allergic to uncertainty. They want precedent, not possibility. So the conversations turned practical: 

• Where does AI actually add value to our clients?
 

• How do we apply it to our business models?
 

• Which questions should we be asking before we roll out another shiny new system? 

One firm had already tested AI in small claims processing by digitising client onboarding and pricing by stage instead of by hour. The result: happier clients, predictable revenue. But for every story like that, there was another about risk. For example: 

• Hallucinations such as those used in cases in court that were invented.  

• Concerns around consent and data privacy, especially around client data.  

• Algorithms pulling bias from historical judgments.  

• Even concerns around the fact that everything you create using AI, including the prompts you use, showing up in discovery.  

The old commentary that “lawyers fear change” doesn’t quite hold up anymore. They don’t fear it, but they do fear the lack of control that comes with it. 

The Trust Gap 

That anxiety isn’t irrational. The plumbing of AI, where data flows, who owns it, how it’s used, remains opaque to many legal professionals. Clients, too, are growing wary. “We don’t want you using AI,” some insist. But what they often mean is: tell us how you’re using it and prove you’re protecting us. Transparency is the new competence. 

And yet, the Forum wasn’t all warnings. There was quiet optimism about pricing models, accessibility, even fairness. AI is giving firms more ways to charge and deliver value. Instead of eroding the billable hour, it’s diversifying it. One law firm leader described how they’d used workflow data to justify fixed-fee models. “AI didn’t make us cheaper,” they said. “It made us clearer.” 

If AI helps firms understand where time really goes, they can stop selling hours and start selling outcomes. 

The Human Equation 

The conversation inevitably shifted to people. No one believed AI would replace lawyers, at least not yet. Instead, it’s erasing the drudgery: document review, first-draft generation, all the digital heavy lifting that burns time and patience.  

One managing partner proposed that law schools should start offering psychology courses. The room laughed, then nodded. If AI can draft a contract, the human differentiator becomes judgment, rapport, and trust. But here’s the irony: while everyone talked about the big picture of AI, the actual day-to-day chaos of legal work still looked painfully analog. The average lawyer’s day still starts with a 7:00 a.m. inbox check. Hundreds of emails. Clients, partners, “FYIs,” CCs, and one-liners that hide actual work requests. Some lawyers joked that the first real use case for AI should be answering their own email. They weren’t wrong. 

The Hidden Cost of the Inbox 

Most of the industry’s conversation about AI revolves around big-ticket innovation: predictive analytics, automated drafting, knowledge graphs. But the real drag on productivity isn’t a lack of insight, it’s a lack of visibility. Work hides in email. Tasks vanish between threads. Deadlines get buried under CC chains. And while firms talk about “adoption,” the truth is, no one needs to adopt email. It already owns them. 

And this was the reason Belt attended the event. To see if what they were building, would help lawyers.  

The Work-Centric Inbox 

Belt treats email as the front door of work, not the aftermath of it. The app connects email, calendar, contacts, and deliverables into a single thread of context. When a client email lands, e.g. “Can you review this?” Belt doesn’t just file it. It turns it into a task, schedules the time to do it, and links it to the right project or matter. That’s not buzzword AI; that’s AI for all. The invisible kind that fits how lawyers genuinely work. 

In practice, it looks like this: 

A partner sends you a request. Belt identifies it as an action item and flags it automatically. 

You can then quickly turn that ask into a task by checking your calendar, finding space quickly thanks to our workload indicators, and plan it. Now “review this today” actually happens today. When the task is done, Belt helps you draft the update email you were going to write anyway. No dashboards to update. No “just checking in” chasers. And because everything ties back to the original communication, there’s a record  that’s clear, auditable, and discoverable. Exactly what the risk team wants to hear.  

The Bigger Picture 

For an industry obsessed with precedent, this is quietly revolutionary: it doesn’t demand new behavior. It works with the one behavior that’s not likely to change anytime soon - checking email. 

That’s the difference between AI as hype and AI as habit. 

At the event, as executives debated billing models and regulatory fears, what they were really describing was a trust crisis not in technology, but in their own processes. Belt’s approach doesn’t ask lawyers to trust a black box. It just helps them see their own work more clearly. 

AI might draft your contracts faster. Belt makes sure the work that triggers those contracts doesn’t fall through the cracks.