How Stradley Ronon built a culture of confident AI adoption

Stradley Ronon has counseled clients since 1926. With over two hundred lawyers and offices coast-to-coast, the firm has built its reputation on rigorous, results-oriented work. When generative AI (GenAI) arrived, Stradley approached it the same way they approach everything: seriously, methodically, and with their clients’ interests front and center. 

A market full of noise

Stradley Ronon’s GenAI vendor selection process spanned more than a year and involved standardized testing, lawyer focus groups, and a meticulously crafted set of requirements. Rather than settling for a quick win, they were searching for a sturdy foundation. 

The market didn’t make it easy. Sarah Hirebet, Director of Knowledge Management, laments, “when it was time to choose a GenAI tool as a foundational platform, we dug into all of our options. And honestly, across the market, what we saw was a lot of noise and a lot more hype than we saw clarity.”

Stradley’s lawyers had one non-negotiable: any platform under consideration had to be grounded in a legal database. “We are not going to look at any tool that doesn’t have a robust legal database,” said Hirebet. General-purpose AI, however impressive, wasn’t going to earn the trust of attorneys who depend on precision.

But Stradley’s stringent requirements went beyond product features. Even among vendors with strong offerings, they were missing a credible plan for change management. GenAI adoption in a large law firm requires more than mere software installation. It needs a cultural shift. Lawyers are trained to be skeptics. They’re accustomed to outputs that are always consistent. The idea that AI results could be variable, subject to hallucinations, and are probabilistic by nature was, as Hirebet put it, a revelation. “It kind of blew their minds when they found out that output could be variable.”

Stradley went back to their vendor finalists and asked whether they’d agree to partner with Stradley to build something that moves their firm’s people forward. Only one vendor said yes. 

We think Vincent should be the GenAI tool that everyone is buzzing about, because it is absolutely the real deal.

A partnership built to last

Clio leaned into Stradley’s partnership request. The Vincent by Clio team joined Stradley’s requirements-gathering sessions, participated in testing, and began co-designing a training program from the ground up. The result was Stradley Labs, a 13-session, CLE-accredited curriculum built on applied learning theory, co-created with Clio and tailored specifically to Stradley’s lawyers. 

Everything was guided with the idea that we were going to set a standard for excellence in legal training and in helping lawyers to properly meet their ethical responsibilities.

The curriculum was rigorous by design. Each session began with pre-work so live time could focus on hands-on application. Lawyers were organized into peer cohorts, kept connected through informal communication between sessions, and held accountable through real applied assignments. The program also earned 13 CLE credits, accredited across all states where Stradley lawyers practice. 

Content-wise, Stradley Labs delved into the issues that matter most to lawyers. The curriculum addressed the probabilistic nature of large language models, security and data considerations, and an original framework for legal ethics in the AI era. They distilled the ABA’s guidance on ethical AI use into the Six C’s:

1. Candor
2. Client Consent
3. Collaboration
4. Communication
5. Competence
6. Confidentiality

The program culminated in a hackathon, complete with an evaluation rubric, peer grading, and a panel of judges. Stradley successfully and wisely tapped into attorneys’ natural competitive instincts, and it worked. “We created such an immersive experience that we made them feel nervous,” Hirebet recalled. The hackathon provided high-stakes practice in a lower-stakes environment.

Throughout the process, Clio listened and built. When Stradley’s lawyers surfaced a use case that Vincent didn’t yet support, Hirebet raised it with Clio’s product team and they began building right away. “It was something that our lawyers asked for and you guys made it for us,” she said. That responsiveness to feedback exemplifies how working with Clio is a genuinely collaborative partnership.

The culture shift

Vincent by Clio’s adoption results exceeded anything Hirebet had seen before. “I’ve never done a pilot that’s had success at this level or really even over 50% before,” she said. The firm’s lawyers were coming in with intent, with novel questions, and with use cases they’d developed on their own. 

There is zero chance that we could pry Vincent away from most of our team at this point.

Perhaps the most telling moment came in the week following the hackathon. Hirebet’s phone didn’t stop ringing. Five partners called her in a single day, four of whom had never been part of the training cohort. They had heard about it and they wanted in. They also wanted to know which colleagues had been certified through Stradley Labs so they could staff those lawyers on client matters. 

That kind of organic spread is the mark of change management done right. 

One attorney’s story became the program’s proof point. A lateral from another firm arrived skeptical, convinced his previous firm’s tools were better and vocal about what he felt he was missing. Two sessions later, he changed his mind. After a particularly late night co-drafting an SEC no-action letter with Vincent, fighting through his exhaustion, he awoke to the client’s reply email: “You hit this letter out of the park.”

Looking ahead

Stradley Ronon knows that to stay at the forefront of the AI evolution, they can’t slow down now. The firm sees Stradley Labs as a model with momentum that could eventually be offered externally to other firms or in-house legal teams. 

For Hirebet, the relationship with Clio is the foundation that has made firmwide AI implementation so successful. She can confidently go before Stradley’s board of directors and defend a budget increase for AI investment because the partnership has earned that confidence. 

“We want to continue to elevate how our entire firm is operating,” she said, “and we are looking for partners who are hungry in that same way, partners who can talk about innovative ways to serve clients authentically, not just create marketing hype.”

Stradley found that partner in Clio.