18 Sep Building AI-ready lawyers: what legal leaders need to rethink now
AI is reshaping what organisations need from their lawyers and, in turn, how legal teams recruit, develop and deploy their people.
As AI takes on more elements of research, drafting, document review, knowledge retrieval and contract processing, an important question emerges: how should lawyers be developed in an AI-enabled world without losing the essential foundations of the profession?
That question is at the heart of Building AI-Ready Lawyers, a new report from Winmark and Marsden, drawing on insights from senior in-house legal leaders across a range of organisations and sectors. While contributors brought different perspectives, there was strong consensus on the direction of travel. The opportunity lies in rethinking where lawyers can add the greatest value, rather than simply automating more legal work.
The division of labour is changing
For much of the profession’s history, being a lawyer meant personally researching, drafting, reviewing and processing information. AI is beginning to separate legal capability from legal production.
As technology takes on more repeatable tasks, the lawyer’s role increasingly moves towards directing the work: determining what matters, interpreting context, balancing competing risks, influencing stakeholders and ultimately taking responsibility for the outcome.
This raises an important question for legal leaders. Rather than asking where can we use AI? should they instead be asking what work genuinely requires a lawyer?
That distinction has implications for technology investment as well as operating models, team structures and future hiring.
AI places even greater importance on the fundamentals
One of the clearest findings from the report is that greater use of AI does not reduce the need for strong lawyers – in many respects, it actually increases it.
A lawyer cannot reliably identify a flawed AI-generated analysis without sufficient technical knowledge to recognise the flaw. Nor can they decide whether an apparently sound answer is commercially appropriate without understanding the organisation, its objectives and its appetite for risk.
Technical excellence remains critical, alongside judgement, critical thinking, commercial awareness, ethics, communication, influence and relationship-building. As AI takes on more routine legal work, these core skills will play an increasingly important role in what distinguishes excellent lawyers.
Redesigning lawyer development
Junior lawyers have traditionally learned by doing significant volumes of research, drafting, reviewing and correcting – the tasks that AI is becoming increasingly capable of accelerating or performing.
Simply retaining inefficient work for training purposes makes little sense. But removing it without replacing the learning it provides creates a different problem: how will tomorrow’s senior lawyers develop the judgement that today’s leaders acquired through experience?
The report explores how legal teams can redesign that apprenticeship, including giving lawyers earlier exposure to complex decisions, negotiations, stakeholder conversations and strategic advice. It also considers a different role for AI itself – not simply as an answer engine, but as a tool for challenging assumptions and stress-testing lawyers’ own thinking.
Adoption is as much about culture as technology
Buying the technology is the relatively easy part. Creating an environment in which people use it effectively is harder.
The experiences shared in the report suggest successful adoption depends on creating permission to experiment, challenge AI output and learn from colleagues with different skills. This can also change traditional team dynamics, with technologically fluent junior lawyers sharing knowledge with more experienced colleagues while learning judgement and commercial context in return.
Governance needs to evolve alongside that experimentation. The goal is not unrestricted adoption or blanket prohibition, but clear boundaries around where AI can act, where human review is required and where professional judgement must remain firmly in control.
From efficiency to value
The report includes striking examples of the capacity AI is already creating, from significant reductions in contract review and drafting time to thousands of hours recovered within individual legal functions.
How that capacity is reinvested will be critical. Redirecting it towards strategic advice, earlier involvement in business decisions, stakeholder engagement and risk prevention could fundamentally change the contribution of the in-house legal team, enabling lawyers to focus more of their time on the areas where they can add the greatest value.
This also points to a broader definition of the AI-ready lawyer. Technology skills are only one part of the picture, alongside legal expertise, commercial understanding, risk judgement, influence and accountability.
To receive a copy of the full Building AI-Ready Lawyers report, including practical examples, frameworks and an eight-step roadmap for legal leaders, contact the Marsden in-house team.
