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Every year I’m asked to predict what will shape General Counsel agendas.Every year the world becomes harder to predict — we have more information than ever, but change moves faster than we can process it.
CONTENTS
- 1. The Legal Function Will Finally Admit It Is Not a Law Firm
- 2. AI Will Not Replace Lawyers — But It Will Expose Who Never Really Was One
- 3. AI Will Create More Legal Work Than Any Force in History(And Only AI Can Contain It)
- 4. Fixed Fees Will Win — And Clients Won’t
- 5. Most Legal Functions are still racing the technology train…instead of riding it.
- 6. The GC Role Splits in Two
- A Final Thought
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1. The Legal Function Will Finally Admit It Is Not a Law Firm
For decades, in-house teams subconsciously modelled themselves as “internal law firms”. They give ‘advice’ to “internal clients”. They attempted to be commercial while preserving ‘independence’. It felt familiar. It felt safe. It also limited accountability.
And it didn’t work.
It was the wrong mental model.
Law firms monetise scarcity of expertise.
Legal functions manage an abundance of demand.
Our view: In 2026, leading GCs stop pretending otherwise and redesign accordingly. Legal functions core value is in building and scaling risk operating systems, not advice boutiques.
If your function still measures success by matters closed or hours saved, or worse doesn’t measure anything at all, you are optimising yesterday’s machine.
2. AI Will Not Replace Lawyers — But It Will Expose Who Never Really Was One
AI isn’t coming for lawyers.
It’s coming for legal labour that mistakes information processing for judgement.
In the 90s Peter Drucker said, "knowledge has become the key economic resource and the dominant-and perhaps even the only-source of competitive advantage." He couldn’t have predicted the AI era more accurately.
Drafting, summarising, comparing, reviewing — that is now machine territory. Fast. Cheap. Relentless.
What remains scarce is navigation:
-framing trade-offs
-sequencing risk and understanding internal tolerances
-knowing when precision matters — and when it doesn’t
-applying the above to your organisation
AI doesn’t eliminate lawyers.
It raises the minimum standard of being one.
Our view: The lawyer of the future is not a better drafter.
They are a better pathfinder – navigating complexity to help the business win.
3. AI Will Create More Legal Work Than Any Force in History (And Only AI Can Contain It)
Here is the paradox most legal teams are missing:
AI will not reduce legal work. It will multiply it.
Every AI deployment creates:
• more marketing collateral to review
• new categories of legal risk
• more contracts to assess
• higher expectations for faster answers
AI doesn’t abolish work, it uncovers latent demand.
Legal currently only supports 10% of current demand. The volume of legal “touch points” inside organisations is exploding. Teams that try to manage this manually will be crushed by exponential volume.
Our view: There is only one viable response:
Fight AI fire with AI fire.
-Automate triage.
-Automate first-pass risk assessment.
-Automate escalation.
-Automate first-cut advice.
-Automate document summarisation.
Those who keep ploughing the field by hand will not be noble.
They will be irrelevant.
4. Fixed Fees Will Win — And Clients Won’t
By 2026, fixed fees are everywhere.
This should worry you.
Top law firms have increased effective billing rates by 7–9% per year, consistently outpacing inflation. Fixed fees haven’t reduced cost, they’ve simply bundled higher prices into prettier packaging, while allowing firms to capture the full efficiency gains AI delivers.
Predictability has improved.
Value has not.
Our view: The winners are not negotiating fees harder.
They are unbundling work, stripping firms of process and reserving them for judgement.
Fixed fees are not the victory.
Unbundling and automation are.
5. Most Legal Functions are still racing the technology train…instead of riding it.
The problem is not whether to buy legal tech.
It’s whether you and your team have built the competencies required to fully leverage it.
Technology is not a side project.
It is the foundation of your Legal Risk Operating System.
Our view: Teams deeply embedded into workflows, AI that is customized to their organization, will outperform those with bloated stacks and endless pilots.
If you don’t provide the type of self service support the business demands. They will take their demand online and become ‘Bush Lawyers’ on steroids, with the help of AI.
6. The GC Role Splits in Two
By 2026, the divergence is obvious.
One class of GC rises into strategy, impact and CEO trust.
The other sinks under approvals, policies and inbox triage.
The difference is not intelligence.
It is an operating model transformation.
Our view:
The future GC is not the company’s best lawyer.
They are not merely the manager of legal risk.
Their mandate is to help the organisation navigate change and generate competitive advantage – in a highly scalable way.
A Final Thought
The message here is not about AI. It’s about legal leaders' ability to drive change.
AI will not take legal jobs.
It will make it imperative that this scare talent scales everywhere.
Legal functions that simplify, automate and choose what matters will lead.
Those that cling to artisanal process, heroic effort and manual intervention will drown quietly, while wondering why the workload became impossible.
The future belongs to teams that scale judgement, not effort. This is good news for Legal Functions who evolve.
All your legal work in one AI-powered platform.
Faster reviews, self-service for business teams, and smarter compliance in every workflow.
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