“The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression.”
When Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, wrote those words after conducting over five thousand “play histories” across every walk of life, from Nobel laureates to convicted murderers, he was talking about a fundamental human drive. One that shapes the brain, fuels creativity, and sustains our capacity for collaboration.
And yet, walk into any legal tech conference, read any law firm’s AI strategy memo, or scan the latest industry survey, and you’ll hear the same refrain: efficiency, automation, cost reduction, billable hour optimization. Important goals, no doubt. But if that’s the only conversation we’re having about AI in the legal profession, we’re missing something big.
Beyond Efficiency
There’s nothing wrong with wanting AI to make legal work faster and cheaper. Contract review, due diligence, document drafting: these are obvious, high-value use cases. But framing every AI initiative through the lens of productivity alone carries a real risk. Duncan Wardle, former Vice President of Innovation and Creativity at Walt Disney, explains why in a September 2024 piece for Harvard Business Review: when our brains are stuck in a constant “beta” state (the mode of focused, high-pressure work), we are neurologically incapable of creative insight. Creativity happens in “alpha” and “theta” states, during moments of relaxation, curiosity, and openness. Out of more than 15,000 people interviewed throughout his career, not a single one reported having their best idea on the job. Not one.
Stuart Brown’s research points in the same direction. When humans enter a “state of play” (fully absorbed in a self-motivated activity), they unlock their natural creative potential. The most creative professionals aren’t necessarily smarter or more disciplined; they’ve simply learned to get themselves into the right mood. A 2025 editorial in “Frontiers in Psychology” on creative behaviors in the modern workplace confirms this direction: as organizations face rapid technological change, individual creative and innovative actions are becoming increasingly important for staying competitive.
What “Playing with AI” Actually Looks Like
In practice, this means creating space, real, protected space, for experimentation inside law firms and legal departments. Not every AI project has to come with a business case and a projected ROI. Some should simply start with: “What if?”
What if we used an LLM to brainstorm negotiation strategies with the team, not just to review redlines? What if associates ran prompt creativity sessions where the only rule is that there are no wrong questions? What if we organized a hack day where lawyers and operations staff teamed up to solve a real client problem using AI tools they’d never tried before?
These aren’t frivolous exercises. They’re how curiosity becomes competence. The person who has played with AI for fun is the same person who, six months later, spots the breakthrough use case no one else saw coming.
From Curiosity to Real Adoption
The firms and legal teams that are furthest ahead in AI adoption tend to share one thing in common: they gave their people room to explore before demanding results. They ran AI boot camps as invitations, not as mandatory training. They let trainees and associates experiment with models on fictitious scenarios, low-stakes problems, and creative challenges. They treated early engagement as play, not as a performance metric.
And then something interesting happened: the playful exploration naturally turned into serious, high-impact applications. Because the lawyers had built intuition. They understood the tools as instruments they had handled with their own hands, not as abstract concepts.
Make Room for Play
Sometimes it’s necessary to work and sometimes it’s necessary to play. The legal profession has always known how to work. The question now is whether it can learn to play, and in doing so, discover what AI is really capable of.
So the next time someone in your team opens an AI tool with no particular task in mind, don’t ask them what the deliverable is. Ask them what they discovered.
At Better Ipsum, we help law firms and corporate legal departments design AI implementation strategies that keep human judgment at the centre. If you are rethinking how your team works with AI, get in touch.