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Adoption is no longer the obstacle. According to Thomson Reuters’ Future of Professionals Report 2026, surveying 1,816 professionals across 62 countries, 74% now use AI tools several times a week and 44% multiple times a day. Yet 91% say their organisations are falling short of what the technology could deliver, a shortfall the report calls the “AI value gap.”
The reflexive explanation is lawyerly caution. The real answer is more uncomfortable, and it runs along three fault lines. For platforms built for the region, such as Oqood AI, the Gulf’s first Arabic AI-powered legal platform, those fault lines determine whether a tool gets used or shelved, long after the licence is signed.
One: the incentive problem
The billable hour penalises the efficiency AI delivers. Clio chief executive Jack Newton has described a “structural incompatibility” between AI-driven productivity and hourly billing: if a tool lets a lawyer do in one hour what took five, the invoice shrinks by 80% for identical output.
At the individual level the consequence is stark. An associate measured in hours has three options with a time-saving tool: quietly not use it, use it and bill the hours anyway, or use it and be quietly penalised. The polished version of the argument is that the billable hour is incompatible with AI. The blunter version is that partner compensation is, and billing is merely where it surfaces.
The economics reward standing still. Thomson Reuters’ 2026 State of the US Legal Market, published with Georgetown Law, found firms enjoying record profits, with rate growth rather than demand driving revenue. Median partner rates at the largest firms have crossed $1,000 an hour. From inside, urgency is hard to feel.
Two: clients have entered the argument
What is shifting the calculus is client pressure, and it has turned sharp. Clients now ask for line-item transparency: was AI used, and what did it save? Some have issued guidelines refusing to pay for work performed by AI.
The Thomson Reuters research quantifies the gap. Of corporate clients buying professional services, 78% said AI-enabled quality improvements from providers are very important or essential. Only 6% said most or all of their providers deliver. As a result, 32% have reconsidered or plan to reconsider relationships with firms they see as falling behind, putting an estimated $143 billion of US client revenue under active reconsideration.
Meanwhile the savings have not materialised in a form clients accept. Nearly 60% of in-house counsel report no noticeable savings yet from outside counsel’s generative AI, according to a survey by the Association of Corporate Counsel and Everlaw. Among firms, 58% say AI has not affected billing at all.
Three: buy the tool or rebuild the workflow
The third fault line decides whether any of it works. According to McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI survey, 88% of organisations use AI somewhere, but only 6% capture meaningful value, and the winners redesign the workflow first rather than bolting AI onto an existing process.
Thomson Reuters found the same pattern: firms with a visible AI strategy are 3.9 times more likely to see ROI, yet only 22% have one. Most are measuring nothing at all. Only 15% to 18% of organisations track AI’s return on investment, while roughly 40% do not know whether anyone is measuring it.
For a managing partner, that reframes procurement. The question is not which platform to buy. It is whether the firm will change how work is done, because dropping a tool into a process built for another era produces exactly what most firms report: licences bought, pilots run, behaviour unchanged.
What this means for the Gulf
These tensions are universal, but the Gulf adds pressure. According to Ken Research, the GCC legal-tech market is worth roughly $1.2 billion, with adoption rising about 15% a year and average lawyer hourly rates climbing around 10% annually.
The regional difference is that a tool must clear an additional bar before the business-model debate even starts. It has to work in Arabic, within civil-code systems, and inside data-sovereignty rules that treat where legal information resides as a matter of state. A platform failing that test never reaches the workflow conversation.
This is the gap Oqood was built to close, designing for the region’s languages, legal systems, and regulatory expectations rather than adapting a tool built elsewhere. Fit is the entry requirement. What a firm does with it is the harder question.
The debate resolves outside the room
The procurement debate will not be settled by partners weighing features. It will be settled by clients, by leaner competitors, and by whichever firms redesign the work rather than merely equip it.
The firms hesitating are not irrational. They are responding accurately to their incentives. That is precisely why disruption arrives from the edges, in the work clients already suspect should be faster, until the expectation hardens and the old model becomes indefensible.
