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The largest law firms perform hand-painted legal work for the most demanding clients on the planet.

Those same clients are now putting firms on the stand, asking whether artificial intelligence can make their services better, faster, and cheaper (so long as it doesn't compromise their data).

"Clients want it because they can see the potential client value," said Ed Black, technology strategy leader for Ropes & Gray. "We want to deliver. We're a service organization."

Behind closed doors at Big Law firms, a technological shift is underway. Lawyers, developers, and legal operations teams are experimenting with generative AI to reimagine everything from due diligence and document review to legal research and compliance risk detection.

While lawyers at Morgan Lewis use legal tech to review fund documents and extract key terms, attorneys at DLA Piper rely on bespoke language models to help clients identify compliance risks. Gibson Dunn says it's piloting ChatGPT Enterprise with roughly 500 lawyers and staff.

To understand how this transformation is playing out at the top of the legal profession, Business Insider contacted the 10 largest firms by revenue, according to American Lawyer Media's annual ranking. For each, we examined how it evaluates new AI tools, where it puts them to work, and how it governs their use so lawyers don't end up in headlines for the wrong reasons.

Five of the top 10 firms provided partner-level interviews for this story. Representatives for Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, Skadden, and White & Case declined to participate, and a spokesperson for Baker McKenzie did not respond to an interview request.