Ford's GC Steven Croley just put law firms on notice: "Our internal use of AI for increased productivity so far exceeds what we have seen from external counsel." The message to outside counsel? Move faster or lose the work.

He's right that speed matters. But speed isn't quite the lesson.

A while back I wrote that the outline comes before the exam—that AI performs only as well as its foundation: clean data, sound processes, strong (long-form) prompts, and lawyers who know the law well enough to direct and check it. Cohen & Gresser called it "building the road before buying the Ferrari." I still think that's right. The firms that win Croley's challenge won't be the ones who bought the flashiest platform fastest. They'll be the ones who built the road first—and then floored it.

What strikes me most is where this points. Clients increasingly want help implementing, using, and monitoring AI for legal work. That means the wisdom lawyers deliver ad hoc—the black box of good judgment—increasingly needs to be memorialized in AI-powered workflows and playbooks and knowledge bases clients can actually use.

As Croley put it, AI's efficiency is "an existential threat to some—and an enormous opportunity for others."

It's an exciting time to be a lawyer, to say the least!