Four years into generative AI, and almost no company has standardized its use of the technology. Most companies are still experimenting and figuring out what works for their business, convinced everyone else has this more figured out than they do.
Meanwhile, the business isn’t waiting. PagerDuty’s 2026 Shadow AI Survey reveals that two-thirds (66%) of office professionals are using AI tools at work that they believe are prohibited. Verizon’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report found shadow AI detections rose fourfold in a year.
Rather than reading this only as a compliance problem, view it as a demand signal. People have found something useful and are adopting it faster than companies can build processes around it. And for in-house legal teams, that creates an opening to increase a lawyer’s influence and strategic value. The business needs General Counsels (GCs) who can understand the opportunity, identify where the meaningful risks are, and help build the infrastructure that allows the organization to move forward confidently.
Legal Needs to Operate as a Business Partner
Many lawyers choose to work in-house because they want to be part of the business. They don’t want to advise from a distance. They want to understand how the organization works, what different teams are trying to accomplish, and how legal can help them get there.
But there is a tension familiar to almost every in-house lawyer, where they want to be strategic business partners, yet enormous amounts of time can disappear into low-complexity work that doesn’t even really require a law degree. AI makes that tension much harder to ignore because, if technology can handle more repetitive work, there’s an opportunity to spend more time on the work where legal judgment actually matters.
But becoming a strategic partner requires more than adopting AI tools. In-house legal teams need to ensure they understand what the business is trying to accomplish in the first place.
Consider this question for General Counsels: Should we build our own AI tools?
Natural-language coding has made this task feel accessible in a way it wasn’t even two years ago. A GC who has never written a line of code can describe what they want and watch something functional appear. When the alternative involves procurement, implementation, and a budget conversation, the appeal is obvious.
But being able to create a working prototype is different from being able to operate one. Someone must own maintenance, security, permissions, integrations and output quality. For lawyers, accuracy isn’t optional. If you can’t trust an output, you have to verify it, and eventually, verification can cost more than the original work would have.
If you don’t have time to sit through a vendor demo, you probably don’t have time to maintain an entire technology infrastructure for your legal matters.
The fact that questions like this increasingly land with the GC demonstrates how much the role has expanded. Technology architecture wasn’t traditionally part of the in-house job description. Now, legal leaders are helping decide not only what risks technology creates, but also how technology should fit into the business. This requires them to think like operators. And understanding these business outcomes is how legal earns credibility beyond the legal department.
Businesses Now Expect Speed, Visibility and Proactivity
Businesses are increasingly asking their legal teams for three things: speed, visibility, and proactivity.
Speed, because everything else in the company moves at the pace of AI-enabled and legal is the department most visibly out of step when it doesn’t. Visibility, because a request that disappears into legal for three weeks and returns without explanation is no longer tolerable when every other function can show status on demand. And proactivity, because AI and privacy issues surface faster than anyone can escalate them, and the business expects legal to have raised the question before it becomes a problem.
Legal used to be reactive by design. Bring Legal a question, and they answer it. Now, lawyers are expected to anticipate. Where is AI going to show up in this initiative? What data will this vendor touch? Are there any blind spots we might be missing? What are we going to wish we’d asked six months from now?
Being able to answer those questions before anyone asks is what elevates modern GCs from a checkpoint to a strategic business partner. Legal cannot meaningfully govern technology they don’t understand or anticipate risks without knowing where the business is going. The modern in-house lawyer, therefore, needs enough operational visibility to see around corners and enough commercial understanding to distinguish between a theoretical risk and one that could genuinely affect the company.
AI Changes Which Lawyer Skills Are Most Valuable
Another unintended consequence of AI receiving less attention is how its changing which skills differentiate great lawyers. FTI Consulting and Relativity’s 2026 General Counsel Report found 87% of general counsel now report generative AI use within their teams, nearly double the year prior. We’re quickly moving beyond the stage where using AI itself distinguishes an “innovative” legal department.
As AI absorbs more research, synthesis and pattern recognition, what differentiates lawyers shifts toward what was always hardest to teach. Communication, persuasion, emotional intelligence, commercial judgment and institutional knowledge now matter even more, and they’re harder to replicate precisely because they depend on context. The ability to understand what an executive is really asking and to translate complex legal analysis into clear, actionable advice is enormously valuable.
These “soft skills” that get mentioned in passing at review time are becoming the core of the job. As the general counsel role continues settling at the intersection of law, technology and commercial strategy, lawyers don’t have to become engineers. But they do need enough AI and technology literacy to hold a real opinion, ask a useful question and recognize when an answer doesn’t add up.
The GC Is Moving Closer to the Business Strategy
For a profession that spent years asking for a seat closer to the business, AI is giving Legal a once-in-a-career opening. The most valuable in-house lawyers over the next few years will be those who can look at a sprawling, partially undocumented AI footprint, correctly identify the few things that could hurt the company, and consciously leave the rest alone.
That’s an uncomfortable standard for a profession trained toward completeness. Lawyers are taught to identify every risk, not to rank them or accept most of them. But the technology moves faster than any review cycle, adoption is outpacing documentation, and a lawyer who insists on evaluating everything will end up meaningfully evaluating nothing.
The questions coming at us concern where the data came from, how the systems were trained, and whether anyone can explain what the AI is actually doing. Those legal questions will reach us regardless. Fortunately, we can still arrive early enough to shape how these systems are deployed, rather than waiting to document decisions others have already made.
