Human guidance is the key to unlocking AI's potential in legal teams.
AI is an enabler, not a replacement for legal expertise
Human guidance is the key to unlocking AI's potential in legal teams
"Navigating how to use AI as a time saving, efficiency tool, rather than simply another bit of tech that requires too much learning and investment for me to use it."
- One respondent on their legal team's biggest challenge in 2026
Why it matters
Legal teams are under mounting pressure to deliver value and reduce cost and AI is touted as a solution. AI clearly does present a significant opportunity, especially for smaller teams looking to unlock efficiencies with the right tools, although those opportunities must be weighed up against budget constraints and implementation practicalities. Meanwhile, law firms are investing significant amounts of time and resource re-thinking their people, client and tech strategies to account for AI. Legal teams will reap the benefits of that investment through more efficient service delivery and AI collaboration opportunities with external counsel. But they should also be considering how AI can enhance their own team's offering, whether they need to reconfigure the team and how to future-proof team development.
Travers Smith view
Sharing some thinking points on AI implementation:
- Legal tech products and use cases: It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the pace of development in legal tech, which has moved significantly beyond e-discovery into contract review and other automated workflow tools. Vendors aim to embed these tools in standard working practices across the industry and move on to the next phase of development with autonomous workflow tools such as agentic AI, which can predict and initiate actions in a legal process, such as contract renewals. It remains to be seen whether these systems will be capable of delivering actionable benefits at scale and complexity doesn't always deliver added value. Common pitfalls we see include:
- overlooking capabilities already paid for or licensed in existing platforms; - pilots without clear success criteria, accountable owners, or an exit/scale decision; - assuming AI will reduce workload without accounting for increased training, checking and oversight; and - deploying tools without a governance policy covering data handling, validation, and retention.
- Risk, governance and insurance: It is vitally important for legal teams to be involved in setting the guardrails for safe use of AI across the wider organisation and establish the liability and insurance position as regards use of AI tools. AI technologies can produce inaccurate or misleading results and as noted above, give rise to significant IP, data governance, confidentiality and ethical concerns. Insurers will want to know you have implemented AI in a responsible manner.
- Impact on skills, legal training and recruitment: The AI shift and generational differences in approaches to learning have important implications for the way in which you will recruit, train and assess performance in legal teams. It's important also not to lose sight of core legal and skills training needs.
Action points
Where to start with technology solutions:
- Assess the needs of your team. Keep things simple.
- Focus initially on integrated AI tools in current products, such as Microsoft Copilot, Teams AI meeting notes and Lexis+, to meet needs and achieve measurable results with minimum cost or disruption.
- Don't overlook established non-AI-based solutions such as document automation tools which may provide a more reliable fix.
- Larger organisations with bigger budgets and more complex needs may wish to look at the next "bucket" of AI products, dedicated generalist AI platforms such as ChatGPT Enterprise for research, drafting and summarising.
Tick off some quick-win AI use cases:
- Meetings: generating meeting agendas, minutes and action points
- Summaries: condensing policies, board papers, and lengthy papers into executive-ready briefs
- Document analysis: checking large datasets for common features
- Research accelerators: AI-based tools providing citation checks can help speed up legal and business research, collate sources and verify results accuracy
- Workflow assistance: generating checklists and timelines for BAU activities.
Clearly define the rules for safe use of AI within your team:
- Implement an AI policy with clear guardrails on safe and responsible use. We can help with this if needed. Some starting points below.
- Always check AI output due to risks of inaccuracy and misleading results.
- Check AI-generated content for potential copyright or IP infringement.
- Never upload confidential, personal, or business-sensitive information to public AI platforms.
- Require team members to disclose any use of AI in their work: for both risk management and performance assessment.
- Consult your insurers about liability for AI-generated work. Insurers are keen to understand the governance structures around the use of AI in legal work, particularly the quality assurance and supervision arrangements for junior team members.
Future-proof your team development:
- Upskill teams on AI capabilities, critical analysis, output refinement, and safe, ethical AI use, in the context in which you are using it.
- Update competency frameworks and prioritise broader human skills (critical thinking, cross-functional collaboration, people and team management) alongside tech literacy. These skills will come to the fore in an AI-enabled world.
- Focus on structures and processes to capture and share tacit legal expertise from senior lawyers which will help junior lawyers develop the wisdom and judgement which tech cannot easily replicate.
- When recruiting into legal, candidates who can bring an added dimension to the role, whether it be data science, business management, or process optimisation, will add value to your future team.
Training and guidance from your external counsel:
Finally, as you think about your team development, do take advantage of guidance and team training offered by your external counsel. Travers Smith runs targeted training programmes for in-house teams on a variety of legal and skills topics, designed around your needs, including bespoke masterclasses, peer-to-peer roundtables, in-person seminars, online webinars and mock interactive workshops. Highlights of our offering include:
- Disputes and Investigations training: Our Disputes and Investigations teams will help you to stay on top of legal developments and market trends in the litigation space, with tailored, practical training covering your most pressing business needs, including procedures to avoid falling foul of the new failure to prevent fraud offence, best practice in investigations, tools for crisis management or guidance on the changes in the law on privilege.
- Team legal training on core topics: Our In-house Lawyers' Academy, Next Gen Counsel and GC Programmes offer essential training on core topics, such as data protection and contract negotiation for you and your team members.
- ESG Academy: The second phase of our ESG Academy. A free, award-winning, on-demand online training programme led by experts from across the firm. Learning modules include Natural Capital, Stewardship and Engagement by Asset Owners, and Trends in ESG Litigation and Antitrust. We provide an international overview, as well as looking at some of the more progressive legislation in the UK and EU.
- Group M&A refresher training sessions for in-house professionals: Led by our market-leading M&A team, we offer step-by-step training on M&A transactions for teams without recent or significant M&A experience as well as more advanced, bespoke sessions for larger, more experienced in-house teams.
- Professional skills training for you and your team: Bespoke team skills training on professional skills challenges as well as team leadership masterclasses for GCs.
Do get in touch with the training contacts below if you are interested in any of these programmes.
