Hundreds of applications for a single CIO role.
Everyone wants the job. Almost nobody agrees on what it actually is.
That was the starting point for the latest episode of Crespect Talks, where our co-founder Karolina sat down with Jan Willamo, former Chief Digital Officer at Roschier and now at FIC Advisory, and Alexander Irschenberger, CEO of Legal Tekno, to unpack a question more law firms are quietly asking: is this role a driver’s seat, or a very well-decorated waiting room?
Here’s what we took away:
Firms don’t know what they’re hiring for
Alexander opened with the core problem: law firms don’t really know what they’re looking for, and without a clear target, it’s hard to hire the right match. He drew a contrast with startups, which hand a similarly undefined hire real authority to shape the role as they go. Law firms, in his experience, don’t extend that same trust. New CIOs and Heads of AI typically still need partner approval for nearly everything, a setup he called not built for success.
Jan agreed. His own path into the CDO seat at Roschier never came with a written brief; he grew into it as the firm and business environment changed. His take on authority itself was blunt: mandate is most definitely earned, not something that comes through your CV.
Trust and credibility still have to be built from scratch, especially inside a partnership where every partner is already excellent at what they do and would rather practice law than adopt new technology.
“Panic hiring” is really FOMO hiring
Asked whether headlines like Kirkland’s $500 million AI investment are driving inbound demand, Alexander didn’t hesitate: definitely, though he’d call it FOMO hiring more than panic. He compared it to the licensing rush of 18 to 24 months earlier, when firms bought tools without matching investment in training or adoption.
Now the same pattern is repeating one level up: after realizing the tool wasn’t enough on its own, firms are hiring a person to fix what the tool couldn’t, often without a clear picture of what that person should do. He was blunt about the titles: Head of AI, in his view, doesn’t mean anything yet inside a law firm, unlike a title such as equity partner in M&A, which everyone immediately understands.
Why in-house teams are pulling ahead
Karolina raised Alexander’s own 2026 prediction that in-house legal teams would outpace law firms on AI adoption. His reasoning: in-house teams operate in a business measured on revenue and cost efficiency, creating a sharper incentive to move fast.
Law firms, by contrast, are coming off record profits and revenues across most major markets, which removes the urgency. Even a headline figure like Kirkland’s $500 million, he pointed out, is comparatively modest when spread across firm revenue over roughly a decade.
Should the CIO even be at the table?
Karolina framed the core tension as gatekeeper versus driver: some hires are genuinely empowered stakeholders, while others mainly report trends back to management without real authority.
Alexander was skeptical the CIO role, as it exists today, will end up driving pricing and business-model decisions at all. Services get priced by what the market will pay, he argued, and that calculation has always run through people who understand the revenue side of the business, not the technical side. His conclusion: firms wanting someone at that strategic table may need to recruit the role from inside the equity partner group itself, rather than hiring a technical outsider and hoping to fold them in later.
The closing word
Asked to leave law firm leadership with one sentence each, Alexander’s was about reframing the conversation entirely: AI needs to be treated as good business, because it is good business.
Jan’s was shorter: Embrace the change, and the opportunity that comes with it.
Want to hear the full conversation? Catch the replay of Crespect Talks: The Coolest Job Nobody Knows How to Do on YouTube or Spotify.
