CMS has adopted a bonus scheme that rewards staff for their use of AI, becoming the latest firm to provide financial incentives to encourage take-up of the technology.
The AI value contribution bonus, introduced towards the end of last year, makes all employees excluding partners, business services chiefs and staff whose role is to develop AI, eligible for an individual bonus of up to £5,000.
CMS has rolled out the programme across offices registered under its UK LLP, which includes all UK offices, as well as those across the CEE, Middle East and APAC regions.
Speaking to Legal Business, CMS UK managing partner Adrian Bell said the decision to encourage AI usage was a top priority of his when he was appointed to his role in April.
‘One of the first things I did when I came into my role was change our bonus regime. Our arrangements are typically like most other law firms, based on chargeable/billed hours, so one thing that I did was put an overlay on that for 12 months to buy us a bit of thinking time, which was also to provide financial incentives for people to use AI.’
‘We had some venture capitalists coming to us after our internal competition and asking if they could buy into the ideas’
The firm has long been exploring its use of the technology, as it was quick to implement Harvey at the start of 2024, and expanded its relationship in December 2025 by rolling it out firmwide. CMS has also invested in Microsoft Copilot, which is accessible across all of its offices.
The AI bonus is separate from the firm’s pre-existing hours-based bonus, and intends to recognise where employees are using the technology to improve on how they can deliver in their roles and the client experience, as well as to advance knowledge sharing activity within the firm.
Employees must be nominated for the bonus by hitting these criteria, as well as demonstrating regular AI usage. How much staff can be awarded is dependent on the contribution made and the number of employees who qualify under the scheme.
Bell (pictured right) said: ‘It’s more than just about adoption and counting clicks, it’s actually looking at ideas that they come up with – new income streams, new products that we can take to clients.’
Key to this have been firmwide opportunities to debut new ideas, such as the internal CMS: Ignite competition, a Dragons’ Den-style event that encouraged employees to submit ideas for improving AI.
‘We had more than 400 ideas that were whittled down to five shortlisted ideas. Those shortlisted were incubated for six weeks with a legal tech founder and at the end we hosted an external showcase with an audience of clients and partners with some tech experts in to judge it,’ said Bell.
‘We even had some venture capitalists coming to us after and asking if they could buy into the ideas – so they’re really good ideas from our own teams,’ he added.
The decision to create financial incentives follows growing pressure in the legal industry to increase efficiency by using AI, while also ensuring client confidentiality and data protection is upheld.
For CMS, Bell said the AI drive also serves as an opportunity to deepen the firm’s client relationships.
‘It’s about how we incubate those ideas now and how we take them to market, which is fascinating because it does require investment and obviously, we need to make wise investment decisions,’ Bell said.
He continued: ‘I can certainly see an increase in the amount of time and effort that we are spending developing those products, because we can not only take them to the market for existing clients, but we can also sell them to new clients and potentially other law firms as well.’
‘We’ve got a lot of infrastructure in place to make sure that we’re at the leading edge of AI’
By encouraging teams to develop their own ideas for AI usage, Bell is hopeful that the technology will become increasingly specialised, creating more added value when staff employ it in their practice.
‘One thing that we are keen to do is get that right balance between having AI localised in the practice groups, because the practice groups tend to be the ones that know what they need and how to develop that,’ said Bell.
He continued: ‘But at the same time, we want to make sure we’re centralising it so that we’re taking the best examples and use studies from the practice groups and disseminating them across the firm. So, we’ve got a lot of infrastructure in place to make sure that we’re at the leading edge of AI.’
The firm will award bonuses twice a year, with the first payments to be made in December 2026.
CMS’s move comes as firms rush to find ways to incentivise AI use. Earlier this year, Simmons & Simmons also introduced a bonus scheme to reward fee earners for ‘meaningful’ use of generative AI, which does not include routine document summarisation or attending standard training.
Speaking to LB last month, Simmons managing partner Emily Monastiriotis said the scheme is part of a new business plan to move the firm closer to its goal of becoming an AI-enabled law firm.
Shoosmiths has also adopted a similar policy, creating a £1m firmwide bonus pot that will be unlocked if staff hit a target of one million Microsoft Copilot prompts in the next financial year.
