GCs, Look Beyond Automation. Al Will Spark Legal Team Reinvention

General counsel and law firm leaders are no longer talking about when artificial intelligence will arrive—it’s here. And visionary legal leaders aren’t looking to AI just to do the same work faster. We’re beyond just using Pegasus to pull a plow.

GCs are now seeing AI as a force for reinvention. AI doesn’t simply automate tasks or compress timelines; it transforms the substance of legal work. By surfacing imperceptible patterns, reframing risk, and enabling new strategic approaches, AI is empowering legal teams to operate at a higher level of insight and impact.

But this AI revolution isn’t plug-and-play. Leaders will need to look beyond vendors’ products and develop their own clear vision of what modern legal practice should look like.

And it will require rethinking what we expect from law firms, and how we partner with them to deliver legal services in an entirely new—and fundamentally more strategic—way.

This means a new mandate for the modern general counsel: GCs as architects of AI-enabled legal functions, stewards of an innovative culture, and strategic partners who help shape the entire enterprise beyond the legal department. It means recognizing that AI is a catalyst that can reinvent how legal teams create value.

Yet, in this paradigm-changing moment, AI commentary has generally focused on academic frameworks that provide sophisticated theoretical grounding but little implementation guidance, or vendor-aligned content that, while future-facing, leans more evangelical and aspirational than analytic.

This leaves a gap where the real-world perspective should be.

This eight-part series will explore how AI is becoming a force multiplier for the role and impact of in-house legal departments, and examine the emerging—and expanding—role of general counsel and chief legal officers as we manage and lead through this transformation of the legal industry.

From Small to Big to Strategic

In-house legal departments have evolved through distinct phases. As the 1990s ended, most companies maintained smaller in-house teams. They might include a GC and only a few lawyers, whose roles principally involved managing outside counsel to whom substantive work was outsourced.

The dramatic rise of law firm rates in the 2000s ushered in a “Big In-House” era. Here, companies built substantial legal departments to internalize expertise and control costs. Some teams even rivaled mid-sized law firms in headcount and specialization.

Now we’re entering the AI-leveraged phase. In-house teams will become leaner. But these won’t be the reactive, gatekeeping departments of the past. They will be proactive, tech-enabled, and will scale like product companies rather than headcount companies—multiplying their impact through new technology rather than more staff.

The emerging in-house teams will be elite—in their substantive skill, strategic perspective, and the ability to leverage AI tools. These tools will optimize volume and routine work. This, in turn, will allow in-house lawyers to focus on strategy, judgment, and enterprise value creation. In this world, the general counsel becomes chief legal strategist and legal-tech orchestrator.

The AI Strategic Imperative

For boards and CEOs overseeing GCs, this transformation represents both an opportunity and a necessity. Companies that embrace AI-enabled legal functions will operate with greater agility, sharper risk management, and more strategic legal support. Those that underestimate this shift will be left with higher costs, slower execution, and reactive counsel that struggle to keep pace with the business.

The business impact is increasingly quantifiable. Multiple studies have found that organizations implementing advanced digital transformation—including AI—achieve cost reductions of 20% to 40% in functions such as compliance and contract management. According to Bain & Co., the most significant and sustainable savings come when automation is coupled with reengineering processes end-to-end, rather than layering technology onto existing—and increasingly outdated—workflows.

But the upside goes beyond efficiency. A 2025 report on legal professionals found that organizations with visible, defined AI strategies are twice as likely to achieve measurable revenue growth from AI adoption and 3.5 times more likely to realize critical benefits such as better decision-making and enhanced risk mitigation. Despite this, only about one in five organizations have such a strategy in place—a gap that underscores the competitive opportunity for those engaging with this transformation.

True Business Accelerators

AI-enabled legal departments will become true business accelerators. When routine work is automated, lawyers are freed to bring an expanded focus to the creative, value-creating thinking that differentiates a business in the market.

This is the essential shift: AI moves legal teams from a posture of reactive issue-spotting to proactive, data-driven strategy. It enables them to anticipate risks before they materialize, unlock insights buried in complexity, and contribute directly to the growth agenda of the enterprise.

The next article in this series will look at AI as a capacity multiplier and explore how legal departments are innovating by expanding their own use cases for AI tools.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg Tax, and Bloomberg Government, or its owners.

An immaterial amount of this content was drafted by generative artificial intelligence.

Author Information

Eric Dodson Greenberg is executive vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary of Cox Media Group.

Write for Us: Author Guidelines