Eleven years ago, the two of them made the case to the firm's partnership board for something no one at Stewart McKelvey had done before: a dedicated practice innovation function. Its job was to systematically improve how the firm practiced law, covering everything from process and pricing to technology and profitability.

They made that call years before generative AI existed, which is largely why the firm was ready to move fast once AI arrived to the business of law in a substantive way. 

Two different starting points, one shared instinct

Lydia's path to leadership ran through in-house roles first. Those years gave her an early look at how good businesses are run, rather than just the legal work layered on top of them. Sitting on the client side meant understanding different law firms' value for herself, and taking on project work that stretched beyond legal advice into the operational side of the business. "They always let me do a little bit more than just the law," she says. "And I enjoyed that quite a bit."

She became CEO and Managing Partner in August 2015, and has since been balancing the collegiality of a partnership alongside the discipline of running Atlantic Canada’s largest law firm. Early on, she pushed back when a senior partner insisted the firm was a partnership, not a business, telling him they were "professionals in a big business." This ability to see what's working ‘under the hood’ is what took her from evaluating outside counsel to running a substantial business.

Paul came to law with a background in finance and technology. "I just started to look at opportunities to systematize, improve processes, solve problems," he says, recalling his first summer at work. Lydia noticed early. "Paul was the young lawyer you'd have someone pitch a virtual data room to for 50,000 US dollars," she says, "and he'd come in on a Monday and say, if you don't mind, I spent 18 dollars on a license, and here's a secure data room we can use. He'd solve the problem, but he'd also build something everyone else at the firm could use."

By his fifth or sixth year practicing, Paul took a secondment to work on technology projects, and a trip to a legal conference in Chicago sharpened his sense of urgency. "I just couldn't believe what some of the conversations about profitability and leverage and pricing were, things we just weren't exploring at that point," he says. He came back and, in the fall of 2015, not long after Lydia became CEO, the two of them flew to St. John's to pitch creating a practice innovation role to the partnership board. Paul left his practice to become the firm's first Practice Innovation Partner, building out document automation, process mapping, and checklists.

"It wasn't a hard sell," Lydia says. "Paul said he wanted to devote 100 percent of his time to the firm, and it just mushroomed from there." Over the following decade, that function grew to include partner compensation redesign, strategy, financial dashboards, and change management, laying the groundwork for what would eventually become the firm's AI strategy.

A culture of continuous improvement

What Paul and Lydia played key roles in building, long before generative AI arrived, was a culture that could absorb change without resisting it. "You need to develop a culture of continuous improvement, learning, and change," Paul says. "That's actually the model of our practice innovation strategy, so that tools change, technology changes, processes change, but what remains constant is the ability to adapt."

Getting there meant treating partners as owners who were consulted, not employees who could be told what to do. “To dictate how something is going to happen, and expect people to fall in line, has never been a successful strategy in any law firm,” Lydia says. The compensation system overhaul is the clearest example of this philosophy in action; instead of rolling out a new comp system in one year, Paul and his committee spent years building the tools and knowledge partners needed to understand how it would affect their own practice. Then they revisited it every year, through partner interviews and a formal debrief. 

"We've had comprehensive partner interviews at the end of every year," Paul says. "We conduct a debrief session, focus on what works, what doesn't work, what should change, and then implement changes every year to refine it and improve it."

Lydia calls it one of the firm's most successful rollouts. "Taking the time and doing it that way meant partners had time to think about their own behaviors, rather than us just plunking in a system," she says. "That's some rigor we would not have had without that process improvement mindset."

Why adoption came easily when Legora arrived

That decade of groundwork is why Stewart McKelvey became the first law firm in Atlantic Canada to partner with an AI platform, adopting Legora on what Lydia describes as more of a conviction than a line item. "We had not budgeted for that expense when we came into that year's budget,” she says, "but it was a gut feel that this was the right thing to do at the right time."

Lydia credits the AI and Technology Steering Committee, which Paul co-chairs, with backing the decision before it ever reached the wider partnership. "We had the confidence of our board and our team that if Paul was saying this is the time to make this move, and he'd worked it through with the committee, then we had the support, and we were able to go," she says.

When Paul made the case at the firm's partner retreat, the response surprised even him. "We were kind of like: ‘We're in a new era of human history right now. We're moving from the digital era to the AI era, and everything is going to change,’" he says. "You just saw heads nodding all across the room. They were sold on it, because we'd made those investments over the last 10 or 11 years. This wasn't coming out of left field."

The adoption numbers back that up. About two-thirds of the firm's lawyers use Legora at least five times a week. "That's really unprecedented on any major technology we've rolled out," Paul says. "I think the tool is great and intuitive, but I also think it's because we've done the heavy lifting over many years to get them there." 

Lydia points to a subtler reason it landed well: the rollout didn't require splitting lawyers up by practice group the way past systems did. "Normally we would roll something out and have to say, well, if you're in this group, you do this, and if you're in this group, you do this," she says. "For the first time, you can roll something out and, intuitively, each group will use the tool differently, but maximize the opportunity for their own practice."

Rethinking how the next generation of lawyers learns

Both Paul and Lydia see AI as changing something more fundamental than workflow: how junior lawyers develop expertise in the first place. "We don't have the privilege of them doing it the old-fashioned way, like Lydia and I learned, by reviewing hundreds of leases on large due diligence projects," Paul says. "Expectations from clients have shifted substantially, and lawyers across the firm are adapting to meet those expectations." He calls this tension the "AI training conundrum," and the firm's answer is to double down on mentorship rather than step back from it.

Stewart McKelvey recently rolled out a lawyer skills database that lets every lawyer document their level of expertise across practice areas, along with where they want to build new skills, so senior and junior lawyers can be matched deliberately. "A junior might have stronger expertise in AI. They wouldn't have that substantial knowledge of the practice of law. You've got to connect them together," Paul says. 

Lydia adds that junior lawyers are watching their profession change quickly, and believes the firm's job is to meet that head-on rather than downplay it. "We recognize their fretfulness,” she says, “but we've decided to embrace the change rather than fear it.” That's part of why she leans on the firm's most senior partners to take an active role in mentoring and training the newest ones. "We’re at the age and stage in our partnership that, from our most senior partner down, everyone will be able to participate in the growth and development of our young lawyers," she says.

The firm has also built out what it calls a profile of the AI-enabled lawyer, mapping the skills it expects lawyers will need three to five years out, many of which its lawyers are already building in Legora. "Some of the skills are totally brand new, like how you develop an AI prompt or set up an agent, or use the different context layers within an AI tool,” Paul says. "Some are exactly the same as they were 30 years ago, like being responsive to client needs and understanding your client's business." 

He likens the approach to a piece of hockey wisdom. "As Wayne Gretzky says, skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is," he says. "We don't know exactly where it's going to end up, and it's going to change constantly, but that's why we need to get the reps in on that adaptation."

Turning a decade of lessons into a new venture

This accumulated experience, what worked and what didn't, has now become something new in its own right; Paul is Managing Director of the Fortified Firm, a new venture built to diversify opportunities by bringing Stewart McKelvey's approach to change management, pricing, and AI adoption to other law firms and clients. “It’s an opportunity to take everything Paul's developed, and everything we've all learned along the way, and launch something a little different,” says Lydia.

Paul sees the timing as inseparable from the pace of change now facing the profession. "We're just in an era now, with generative AI, of constant change for the legal profession," he says. "Every industry in the world is going to be disrupted, and legal and private practice will probably be among the top industries to be disrupted. It becomes so important that law firms, and their clients, develop the ability to continuously improve and adapt. That's something that can be taught, but you need a consistent framework, a toolkit, and a methodology that can be applied and scaled out."

For Paul, the underlying thesis is simple: "It's not about representing a client on a one-off matter anymore. It's about developing systems and collaborating with the client to solve multiple matters going forward," he says. "That's not just the practice of law; it's understanding AI, pricing, data, process improvement, and change management. That's really what the Fortified Firm is all about, how law firms and clients embrace not just AI, but all the other changes that have to happen along with it."

The demand for this type of support existed long before the business had a name. Other firms had already started asking what Stewart McKelvey was doing, and whether Paul could help them do the same. Lydia remembers hearing from more than one firm that they were looking for their own version of him. "People recognized you needed a change agent," she says. "They didn't really know what the skill set was that they needed, but they were recognizing that times were starting to really change in the profession." It just took a few more years, and a name, to turn that recognition into an actual offering.

Empowered by the future

"Getting something done in a law firm can have its challenges," Paul says. "If you know how to get things done in a law firm, you can pretty much get things done anywhere."

"What makes a good lawyer, what makes a strong firm, is all about client service, delegation, mentorship, and understanding your client's business deeply," he adds. "I think that hasn't changed at all, and it's even more important as a result of AI."

"We're inspired by our history, but we're empowered by our future," Lydia says. "You don't want a service provider who's rooted in the past. You want someone thinking forward, evolving at the same pace, or slightly ahead, of your own business."

Legora is the clearest expression of that so far. "It's a tool that's just there wherever you're working," Paul says. "I don't have to use this, but I want to, because it's going to produce a better quality output for the client."

That's the real story behind the decade-long head start: eleven years spent building the discipline to stay ahead of the curve and thrive in an environment of constant change.