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In-house legal teams are navigating the same pressure: more work, higher stakes, and a profession that's changing faster than most organizations can keep up with. In this series, LegalOn CEO Daniel Lewis sits down with in-house legal professionals to talk workload, tools, trade-offs—and what it actually means to be a lawyer today.
Ask Binta Balogun what excites her about AI, and she doesn’t start with big predictions about the legal profession.
She starts with time.
As product and regulatory counsel at Entrust, Binta works in the kind of environment where legal questions are rarely neat. They sit inside product launches, customer demands, regulatory expectations, internal processes, and commercial pressure. The work isn’t just about knowing the law. It’s knowing what the business is trying to do, where the risk is real, and where a lawyer can help people move forward.
That’s why the practical promise of AI matters to her. Not because it can “replace” a lawyer, but because it can take on some of the work that slows lawyers down: pulling together a first cut of research, summarizing long documents, comparing provisions, cleaning up drafts, or helping get from a blank page to something usable.
"AI doesn’t make the lawyer less important. It makes the lawyer's real job harder to avoid."
For Binta, who is also a mother of two, those hours aren’t theoretical. The minutes spent wrestling with admin, formatting, repeat questions, or first-pass document work are minutes taken from deeper legal thinking, better business conversations, or simply getting home with a little more left in the tank.
What This Means for the Junior Lawyer
Binta is especially interested in what legal AI means for junior lawyers. Much of early legal training has always involved repetition: reviewing documents, checking clauses, producing first drafts, searching for the right precedent. Some of that work builds discipline. Some of it is just grind.
AI may change the balance. A junior lawyer who can use these tools may get to the real questions faster: What matters here? What is missing? What would I recommend, and why? The risk, of course, is that speed can create a false sense of competence. Binta’s point isn’t that trainees can skip learning the craft. It’s that the craft may need to be taught more deliberately, with less time spent on mechanical work and more time spent developing judgment.
The In-House Advantage
Her view of the in-house role is similarly practical. The lawyers who will be most valuable are the ones who understand the product roadmap, the customer pressure, the regulatory backdrop, and the commercial trade-offs—not the ones who sit outside the business and review things at the end.
If a tool can help with the first draft, the summary, or the issue spot, then the lawyer’s value has to show up somewhere else. In context, prioritization, judgment, and trust. In knowing when a risk is material and when it is not. In helping a product team see around corners. In giving advice that can actually be used.
For Binta, that’s the real opportunity. AI doesn’t make the lawyer less important. It makes the lawyer’s real job harder to avoid.
Binta Balogun is a product and regulatory lawyer at Entrust.
