This post references findings from Thomson Reuters' 2025 Future of Professionals Report. Read the full report to explore how AI is reshaping legal, tax, and accounting professions.
Every year, the Thomson Reuters Future of Professionals Report gives a snapshot of where legal, tax, and accounting professionals are heading.
At Supio, we're proud to partner with Thomson Reuters in bringing AI technology to personal injury law firms. That partnership gives us the unique vantage point of seeing both the macro trends captured in reports like this and the ground-level reality of how firms adopt (or struggle to adopt) AI tools.
The report is comprehensive, covering legal, tax, accounting, and corporate functions across multiple geographies. As a former lawyer, now Head of Partnerships at Supio, I wanted to pull out the findings most relevant to Personal Injury practices and show you what they look like in our world.
What follows is the gap between AI's promise and what's happening in PI firms right now.
Legal AI’s transformational potential is real (but so is the adoption gap)
What Thomson Reuters calls the "jagged edge" of AI adoption (the uneven, often chaotic way AI gets implemented within organizations) is widening the competitive gap.
Some are building strategic approaches. Others are allowing patchwork adoption to dictate their AI future.
These figures reflect a legal industry that clearly sees the promise of AI. All the pieces are there (great demos, massive potential efficiency gains, appetite for change).
But dig deeper, and the report also reveals the adoption lag. Only 38% of respondents expect AI to have “transformational or high levels of change” this year.
This tracks with what we’re seeing in the field. Most PI firms are still in what I call the “digestive phase” in comparison to other industries.
They’ve seen the magic, but haven’t yet fully translated that magic into something repeatable.
The fix isn't a 50-page AI policy
But how do you close the AI adoption gap without needing an overly elaborate governance framework?
By deciding, in plain language and with specificity, where AI will actually live in your case work.
That simple act (naming where you’re applying AI and why) improves shadow AI problems because your staff are no longer guessing whether or not it’s a good idea to pop a record into ChatGPT under deadline pressure.
AI-enabled PI firms have made intentional decisions about where AI fits:
- Does AI touch medical records at intake?
- Does AI help organize case files or draft demands?
- Who uses AI and for what tasks?
Supio customers, for example, open up their case file with:
- Medical records already organized
- Missing details flagged before someone has to hunt for them
- Key injuries and timeline gaps already visible before drafting a demand
Hours saved are just the baseline ROI for AI tools
Between 2023 and 2024, the percentage of professionals citing data explosion as a high or transformational force jumped 10 percentage points (now sitting at 61% of all respondents).
For PI firms, this is showing up in the documentation. Hospitals and medical institutions are generating more documentation, imaging, and ancillary records than ever before.
And without AI to help process, organize, and surface critical details, that high volume can result in cases being misvalued, injuries being overlooked, and settlement funds being left on the table.
Take a case that looks like a low-value soft tissue claim. A paralegal might skim the mountain of medical records, see nothing major, and the firm assesses it as a $20,000 case.
But one attorney using Supio clicked into an “undiagnosed injury” alert and found a single line in the records mentioning numbness and tingling in the arms. No doctor had followed up. The client confirmed ongoing symptoms.
They ordered an EMG, discovered cervical radiculopathy, and ultimately settled the case for $75,000. Without that single flagged detail, the file would not have received greater attention.
Another one of our client firms in Colorado saw a $700,000 case jump to $3 million because AI helped them uncover the evidence to prove aggravation of pre‑existing injuries.
Shadow AI is already at work in your firm
From the report, 65% of respondents who have AI goals say they are not aware of their organization’s AI strategy, nor do they have processes or guidance around the use of AI.
That means law firms are using AI without a roadmap. And the gap is being filled by shadow AI adoption.
We see this in the field constantly. Associates or paralegals under pressure to move faster, pop open ChatGPT to research cases or summarize records. No proper data safeguards in place.
And this isn’t just a small‑firm problem. Even well‑known firms with established AI policies can’t completely legislate against these ‘rogue agents’.
These are remote employees, under deadline pressure, and just one tab away from pasting client data into a public AI platform. The technology is simply too easy and too satisfying to ignore.
And the headlines you see on the news (fake cases, hallucinations, firms facing sanctions) are the natural byproduct of shadow AI.
AI comes alive in the small moments on a Tuesday morning
One of the gaps in the broader conversation around AI is the “how.”
Yes, the report quantifies the upside: $19,000 per professional, 240 hours saved. But what does it look like on a busy Tuesday morning in a PI firm? That’s where adoption actually lives or dies.
When I talk to firms, I don’t start with grandiose magic of AI or transformation. I start with what their team will actually do, case by case, in their daily workflow:
→ Opening a file to find that the system has already organized 1,000 pages of medical records.
→ Spotting missing records or bills that need follow‑up.
→ Catching subtle, undiagnosed injuries hidden in intake notes that can change a case’s value.
These “Tuesday morning” moments, where a paralegal sits down with their coffee, opens a file, and instantly sees work that used to take hours (or may have been missed altogether) already in motion.
Want to see Supio in action?
Book time with our team to walk through:
→ Your current case workflow, the types of injuries you handle, how your team reviews medical records, and where bottlenecks occur.
→ Whether you have “shadow AI” happening, whether your team is ready for AI adoption, and what a formal strategy could look like for your firm.
→Live demonstration of Supio on one of your closed cases. Bring a settled case’s medical records, and I'll show you exactly what Supio would have surfaced. You'll see injuries, timeline discrepancies, and missing bills. And with the ability to query the records and narratives in files like depositions, you can see where you could have built a stronger case.
