Diffusion of Trust in Technology: Understanding how Tech Adoption spread in Professional Service Firms

Around three-quarters of the UK’s largest law firms already use AI, and more than 60% are exploring GenAI, yet beyond implementation, the hardest part has surprisingly little to do with the technology itself. Adoption in this sector is always cautious, and trust in the technology can play a significant role in accelerating this. In a sector shaped by regulatory risk, steep hierarchies and the billable hour, resistance to change runs deep, and firms that simply roll out licences often find the tools going unused or not translated into benefits. Drawing on a year-long study inside a mid-sized UK law firm, combining social network analysis, ethnographic observation, and interviews with 45 law professionals, this report asks the following question: how does trust in AI spread between people, and how can that “contagion” be harnessed to accelerate responsible adoption?

The answer challenges the usual top-down playbook. Trust in AI, we find, is contagious but fragile, produced hand in hand with distrust and recalibrated task by task, and it travels sideways through peers rather than down the organisational chart. Noticeably, the network analysis reveals that influence often rests with junior, technology-fluent staff whose informal influence far surpasses their formal rank. For firm leaders, innovation teams and policymakers alike, the report turns these insights into practical guidance: how to safeguard adoption, close the looming AI-oversight gap, and mobilise the peer- and junior-led relationships through which trust actually moves. The central message is one every professional-services leader should sit with: adoption succeeds not when firms implement AI, but when they pair it with a social scaffolding plan that reinforces trust in the technology and reassures its adoption.

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