This acceleration is pushing legal teams—and individual lawyers and consultants—to rethink how they work, what skills they prioritise and how they remain competitive in a changing market.
Technology is now a core competency
A central shift in modern legal practice is the move from viewing technology as an optional add-on to recognising it as an essential part of a lawyer’s skillset. Future-ready lawyers combine strong legal expertise with digital fluency, and this dual competency is the baseline expectation for employers.
Technology is no longer limited to administrative tasks. Increasingly, lawyers are expected to:
- work with AI-assisted drafting and review tools
- navigate intelligent document and knowledge platforms
- interpret outputs from analytics and risk-scoring engines
- use automated intake and workflow systems
The lawyer’s value is shifting away from volume and towards insight, judgement and commercial clarity.
Legal tech is evolving at pace
Legal technology can broadly be understood in four layers, each supporting a different part of the legal workflow.
- Foundational systems – how legal work is recorded and organised
These include document management platforms, matter management systems and internal know-how repositories. Many now incorporate AI features for automated tagging, categorisation and enhanced search.
- Workflow automation – dealing with repetitive tasks
Automation helps streamline repetitive or low-value tasks, such as:
- generating NDAs,
- routing contract requests,
- managing approval workflows,
- enabling self-serve tools for the business.
This frees lawyers to focus on more complex, strategic work.
- AI-enabled legal tools
AI is increasingly used to support traditional legal tasks. These tools can summarise documents, extract key clauses, highlight unusual risk positions, translate content, and generate first drafts.
A helpful way to understand their capability is to compare them to an early first draft prepared by a trainee or junior lawyer. AI provides structure, a baseline and speed—but it might lack context, commercial insight, political nuance or judgement. It accelerates the starting point; it does not replace the lawyer’s decision-making and technical input and drive.
- Analytics and Predictive Technology
Still emerging, analytics platforms can identify trends, provide risk scoring and generate insights that were previously unavailable without time-consuming manual review.
Across the market, lawyers may encounter platforms such as Luminance, Harvey, Icertis, Ironclad, Legora, LexisNexis AI, PLC AI and CoCounsel AI, as well as personal productivity tools that are part of everyone’s life increasingly like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. Enterprise tools operate within a secure environment and draw on the organisation’s own documents, while general-purpose AI tools require careful oversight due to accuracy and confidentiality limitations.
Importantly, there is no expectation that lawyers master every product. Each organisation has its own systems, and the market evolves rapidly. The real value lies in understanding the principles—how technology supports legal workflows and how to adapt to whichever tools a company uses.
How these tools are used in practice
Modern platforms increasingly support everyday tasks across legal teams. For example:
- Sorting contracts: AI systems can categorise agreements, extract renewal dates and highlight non-standard clauses, giving lawyers an instant overview of documents or risk.
- Preparing updates for senior leaders: Tools can produce a first-draft email to a General Counsel summarising key issues for a board meeting—such as major contract renewals, policy changes or litigation updates—which the lawyer then tailors/prioritises with judgement and insight.
- Drafting and negotiating contracts: Tools can generate an initial draft using company templates, compare third-party paper to internal playbooks and flag deviation from approved terms.
- Triage and matter intake: Business teams can submit requests through a portal, automatically routing low-risk items to self-serve options and high-risk matters to lawyers, saving your in-house team some time.
- Risk summaries: AI can consolidate multiple documents or emails into a concise issue-spotting summary, helping lawyers report more efficiently.
- Internal knowledge search: Platforms allow lawyers to search across millions of internal documents, for example “find all templates referencing liability caps”, providing a level of speed and accuracy manual searching cannot match.
These examples illustrate that while AI accelerates and structures the work, the lawyer remains responsible for interpretation, judgement and final output.
Ethics and responsible use: a priority
With the rise of AI, responsible use remains a central concern. Organisations are navigating questions around data privacy, confidentiality, model-training risks, guardrails for staff and the safe use of generative AI. Public cases of inappropriate use underline the need for strong governance frameworks. Responsible use is now a non-negotiable part of legal practice.
Longevity, platform stability and business continuity
Beyond ethics and data protection, legal teams also need to consider the long-term viability of the technology they adopt. Many AI and legal tech providers are young, fast-growing companies operating in a volatile market, where consolidation, acquisition or failure is a possibility. This raises practical questions: how long providers retain data, how quickly information is deleted after contract termination, what exit protections exist, and how teams would maintain continuity if access to AI-enabled tools were disrupted. Jurisdiction also matters, as UK and EU-based platforms may offer stronger regulatory alignment and reduced cross-border data transfer risk. Future-proofing legal operations therefore means assessing not only functionality and cost, but also vendor resilience, contractual safeguards and long-term reliability.
Building a digital mindset
Being “future ready” requires more than familiarity with tools. It requires curiosity, adaptability and an openness to experimenting with new technology. Lawyers who integrate technology into their workflows and remain alert to developments will have a strong advantage in a rapidly evolving market.
Looking ahead
The shift is already underway. Technology is not replacing lawyers, but it is changing the work lawyers do and expanding the range of opportunities within the profession. This period of rapid transformation brings challenges, but also enormous potential for those who embrace change.
Future-proofing a legal career is no longer simply about staying sharp on the law. It is about combining legal expertise with technological fluency, acting responsibly with new tools and viewing innovation as a strategic advantage.