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Many in-house legal teams are navigating the same pressures: more work, higher stakes, and technology that is changing fast. In this series, LegalOn CEO Daniel Lewis sits down with in-house legal professionals to talk workload, tools, trade-offs, and what it means to be a lawyer today.
Christine didn’t grow up planning to be a lawyer. Originally, she wanted to design ships.
Law came later, and at first it didn’t feel like an obvious fit. The formalities of legal practice didn’t excite her. But when she began practicing in M&A and finance, she found a kind of creativity based on depth of knowledge that had been missing before.
At her company, a large financial institution, Christine’s role as Counsel for Product Development spans the globe, and that distinction still shapes how she thinks about legal work today. The value is not in the formality, but in the creativity. She sees things changing now, for both better and worse, with AI.
As a self-described technology enthusiast, Christine is both curious and fluent when it comes to AI. With AI becoming part of the legal environment at her company, she and those around her are experimenting, testing, and trying to understand where various tools can help. But knowing which tool to use, when to trust it, how to test it, and how to build it into daily work takes time and requires training and experimentation.
Even for Christine, it’s hard to keep up. The tools develop quickly, at a pace she hasn’t seen before. The constant change can create paralysis when it comes to choosing one and investing the time to learn it. Six months later, something better or different might come along.
Christine is navigating this challenge by not trying to do everything at once. Instead, she is picking specific projects that can be tackled with technology that works today.
The Concerns Beneath the Excitement
Christine’s excitement about AI comes with concerns. Too many lawyers are using AI without critical thinking and evaluation, communication is worsening, and the depth of knowledge is getting shallower. She sees work that can look complete on the surface while lacking the analysis underneath.
“AI becomes a problem when users stop interrogating the output."
For Christine, the problem isn’t that AI sometimes gets things wrong. That’s to be expected. It becomes a problem when users stop interrogating the output. Bad translations get passed along. Weak analysis sounds polished enough to survive. Embarrassing mistakes slip through because no one has slowed down long enough to ask whether the result is actually right.
Fortunately, that isn’t the case all the time. There are still lawyers who are curious, who dig deeper, who read past the first answer and test whether an analysis holds. But Christine worries about the essential lawyering skills that may be degraded without such diligence—analyzing, challenging assumptions, and understanding what matters that make lawyers who they are.
Can Four Lawyers Do the Work of Ten?
Still, Christine is not pessimistic about the future of practice. She can picture a world in which, with the right tools, a team of four may be able to do work that once required ten. But that depends on the tools working inside the way lawyers work. If systems are disconnected, lawyers spend time moving information instead of using it. If tools are too restricted, they can’t reach the work where they would be most useful. And if users accept outputs without scrutiny, speed becomes a risk rather than an advantage.
When the tools do work, and when lawyers use them with care, the promise is real. Smaller teams will be able to do higher-quality work with less wasted effort. As those gains are won, you may find Christine enjoying the extra time where she likes to spend it, roadtripping.
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