As AI continues to evolve at a remarkable pace, legal leaders are looking beyond the headlines to understand the practical implications for their firms, clients, and the industry as a whole. Questions around automation, efficiency, risk management, regulation and ethics are becoming central to strategic discussions across the financial and professional services sector.
To explore these issues in greater depth, we asked three of our AI speakers to share their own perspectives on the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. Drawing on their experience at the forefront of technology and innovation, they offer valuable insights into the main changes for the legal sector…
Most firms are using AI to do today’s work faster. The firms that will pull ahead are using it to ask what work is now worth doing at all.
AI isn’t coming for lawyers, it’s coming for documents. The economic value of producing a contract, a memo or a research note is collapsing toward zero. What rises in value is judgment: knowing which argument to make, which risk to take, which client to turn down. The premium shifts from output to discernment.
Hallucination is not the real risk in regulated work, unverifiable reasoning is. A wrong answer can be caught by a partner; an unauditable chain of AI reasoning embedded in advice cannot. The firms taking this seriously are investing not in bigger models but in verification – the ability to prove, after the fact, how an AI reached a conclusion. This is the work we’re doing at Conscium, and it is, in my view, where the regulated industries will eventually have no choice but to go.
The billable hour and agentic AI. If a junior’s six hours of research becomes six minutes, the model that priced the six hours starts to break down. Firms have two choices: defend the hour or rebuild around outcomes, subscriptions or fixed-fee work where productivity gains accrue to the firm, not the client.
Most firms are sitting on decades of precedent locked inside PDFs, emails and individual partners’ heads. The smart firms will be the ones investing in the unglamorous work of making that knowledge machine-readable now, before they try to deploy agents on top of it.
Partnership structures were designed to slow decisions down. Consensus, seniority, and committees made sense when the cost of a bad decision was high and the cost of a slow one was low. AI changes the second part of that equation. The hardest problem in front of a managing partner today is redesigning the firm to absorb the speed the tool unlocks.
Most of the conversation about AI in law is stuck on operations – how it speeds up review, research, drafting. This is important but the much bigger and more important shift that I speak to is strategic and competitive: AI is remaking the social, economic, political and geopolitical world that the clients of law firms are operating in, and as it does, the interests of every stakeholder for a firm – clients, employees, regulators and governments – are rapidly transforming.
- Operational gains are table stakes; the advantage is strategic. Within a couple of years every firm will have access to the same commoditised tools. The differentiator won’t be whether a firm has automated document review but whether they understand how AI will reshape clients’ industries faster than competitors.
- Clients’ legal needs are being rewritten in real time. As AI transforms businesses it generates entirely new demand: liability and IP disputes over training data and AI output, governance and disclosure obligations, employment questions as workforces are restructured, antitrust around concentration in the AI stack. The work mix of the next decade looks nothing like the last.
- The economics of the firm are in play. The billable hour and leverage pyramid were built on junior lawyers doing the work AI now compresses. That isn’t only a margin question, it’s how the next generation of partners learns judgment when the apprenticeship work disappears.
- The rules are a moving target. Courts, regulators and bar bodies are rewriting expectations on AI use, disclosure, privilege and client confidentiality, and doing it unevenly across jurisdictions. Advising clients well now means tracking a compliance landscape that is still being built.
- The global order your clients operate in is fragmenting. AI has become an instrument of national strategy – export controls, data sovereignty, sanctions, industrial policy. Firms advising multinationals are now advising into a far more contested environment, where the legal and the geopolitical are increasingly inseparable.
- Handled well, this is a chance to move up the value chain. The firms that thrive will push towards the judgment, strategy and trusted-adviser work AI can’t replicate.
Thinking about the bigger picture, in her latest speech topics Sophie explores how lawyers will need expansive knowledge of how technology and AI will shape the world around us and beyond…
AI infrastructure including data centres and related systems, will likely be autonomously built and maintained in the future. This emergence of “post-human architecture” will become an increasingly visible part of our landscape. Important questions arise – how humans will inhabit, work within, and design for robotic buildings, cities and landscapes?
The evolution of trust will also be fundamentally reshaped. When humans do not fully trust one another, they rely on contracts to formalise agreement and provide legal recourse. In a world where AI agents and, increasingly, autonomous robots act on behalf of individuals and organisations – what will they do? Trust technologies will have to be built in across the stack.
Finally, the buildout of assets in space is likely to accelerate significantly – compute, communications, manufacturing and space stations. As the prospect of individuals and organisations having “space addresses” becomes more realistic, there will need to be a lot of new law! In the meantime, off-Earth assets play an increasing role in the terrestrial economy. What should long-term space strategies be?