Big law is an easy target right now. Lots of people take potshots at it over how it’s adopting AI, or not adopting it, and plenty of people applaud it too. I want to step out of that for a second, because I don’t think either side is looking at the part that actually matters. I want to talk about what it’s like to lead a law firm right now. Because let’s be clear, none of us knows how this AI era ends. If it ends. The models are moving faster than anyone can absorb, and that’s before you even get to the workflow layer, the orchestration layer, all the infrastructure that still has to get built on top of it. There’s no playbook for this, because nobody has done it before. Many firms’ current and future AI attempts will stale before anything gets going. That is more indicative of AI development pace, not some inherent flaw in leaders. Let’s be clear, leading a firm was already a hard job. Even before any of this. The leader’s job got exponentially harder because the value and risk at stake got so much bigger. But the leader’s role is still anchored to firm’s political economy. You get to the top of a firm by being good at that internal economy, building a book, navigating people, winning the room. Now that same role demands something totally different while remaining in that original sphere. It demands operational excellence, real operational chops. The kind of work demands knowing the business at depths most lawyers never exist in. Those two things don’t naturally live in the same person, and firms have mostly tried to solve it by standing up a C-suite and handing the operational half over to them. Some of that works. But the divide doesn’t close, because the people with the actual authority to move the firm still got there on the political side. So the question I keep coming back to. How do you take leaders who were chosen for political savvy in a very internal, very human economy, and equip them to become masters of operational excellence, right when the moment demands it most? And how do you get them to champion it, when part of what it asks is letting go of the machine they inherited from the people who came before them? Saying things like lawyers hate change or the billable hour is the wrong incentive is unhelpful. Getting leaders the time and space to learn while steering political economy is the greatest challenge of our time. Many can. Some will. But they are working against compounding forces.