AI Without the Enterprise Budget: A Guide for Canadian Small and Mid-Sized Firms
By Andrew Terrett | March 9th, 2026 AI as the great leveler…
For the past few years, much of the publicly available discourse on AI in the legal press has focused on large national firms investing in enterprise-grade AI platforms like Harvey or CoCounsel. This focus creates a misconception that AI is exclusively for the elite.
Yet a quieter and perhaps more significant shift is taking place in smaller practices across Canada. Far from being the exclusive domain of large national firms with deep IT budgets, AI is proving to be a great leveler, allowing small and mid-sized firms to compete effectively with their larger counterparts. But to leverage this, the right steps need to be taken in the right order.
Education and Governance Before Tools – Why That Matters
AI strategy must begin with education (extending beyond just the regulatory landscape) and defining the problems that are most worth solving. Once education is established, move immediately to governance.
Step 1: Establish Guardrails
If your firm has no AI usage policy, start there. Without one, your teams are operating in a vacuum. A stance of "no approved tools" does not constitute a policy; it is the absence of one.
Step 2: Practical Project Governance
Don’t study endlessly. Instead, set up project governance that is appropriate for your firm's scale.
Whisper it quietly, but you don’t need an AI committee. Instead, you need to empower a small team to experiment, decide, and act.
The AI industry is moving quickly. You need to match that momentum with a similar sense of urgency.
Step 3: Experiential Learning
You will learn far more from AI experimentation than you will from reading about it. The need here is for hands-on, experiential learning—not articling students pulling more articles for review.
Addressing Risk
What law firms fear is risk—and with good reason. Client confidentiality and the critical need for output review are legitimate risk issues that must be addressed. But remember: there is also risk in doing nothing.
Then Products…
As many firms are finding out, AI product selection can quickly descend into “analysis paralysis.”
Stop looking for the single perfect tool—the “one ring to rule them all.” That made for a great book and some equally great movies, but it does not constitute an AI strategy for any law firm.
While high-level requirements are consistent—every lawyer wants better tools for drafting and research—real needs vary greatly based on existing ways of working, access to internal knowledge bases, and individual preference.
The "Build or Buy" Conversation
● Individual Use: Some lawyers might be perfectly happy with just an individual subscription to OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google’s Gemini—as long as their data is secure.
● Complex Needs: Other lawyers need AI to sift through mountains of evidentiary data to synthesize and summarize. In this case, AI strategy becomes a "build or buy" conversation.
It is critical to understand that summarization is just one part of a much larger legal workflow—from instructions to trial or settlement for litigators, or deal closure for commercial lawyers. So no matter how powerful or accurate the AI, by focusing solely on the "AI" component, you have only solved one part of the puzzle.
A Surprising Perspective on Big Firms
Imagine if you are the CIO of a 500-lawyer firm trying to manage legal work of all shapes and sizes. Some practices need simple companions; others need industrial-scale AI-enabled solutions. Good luck with that! So don’t envy the big firms; pity them.
