Assogestioni's Roberta D'Apice on AI, Regulation, and the Harder Question of Legal Value

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.

The easy answers are getting easier. The hard part is proving where lawyers still add judgment, context, and value.

Roberta D'Apice is Director of Legal Affairs at Assogestioni, the Italian association for the asset management industry. Her work sits close to the institutions that shape financial regulation: Italian authorities, European regulators, and members across the financial sector.

Assogestioni's members operate in a heavily regulated environment, and the work is not limited to tracking Italian or European rules. It also means watching developments in other markets, understanding where regulation is moving, and helping financial institutions interpret change in a way they can actually use.

In her own day-to-day work, Roberta uses a general AI tool for practical tasks: drafting, summarizing, research, and getting to a first version of something faster.

She also sees meaningful adoption around her. In Italy, and among the association's members, AI is already being used. But so far, she sees more individual use cases than integrated transformation.

Individual Tools, Not Yet a New Model

A lawyer using AI to summarize a document, draft a first response, or research a topic is real adoption. It saves time. It changes the texture of a working day. It may make an individual lawyer faster. But that is different from rethinking legal work end to end.

In financial services, that second step is hard. Institutions are often large, careful, and conservative for good reasons. They operate under regulatory scrutiny. They have risk controls, governance processes, and established ways of working. Moving from individual experimentation to integrated workflows requires more than enthusiasm. It requires trust, process design, oversight, and a clear view of where human judgment remains necessary.

Roberta expects that shift to happen. Over the next five years, she thinks more organizations will begin taking steps to integrate AI into legal work rather than leaving it as a collection of personal productivity habits. But she is also realistic about the pace. Transformation takes time, especially in sectors where getting things wrong can carry significant consequences.

The Challenge for Lawyers

AI is getting very good at the first layer of usefulness: finding the rule, producing the memo, preparing the first version. What's left for lawyers is everything beyond the baseline answer.

If she were advising a young person today, Roberta says she would not necessarily recommend becoming a lawyer. Lawyers still matter, but adding value is becoming harder.

AI is getting very good at producing initial answers. It can summarize, draft, research, and explain. It can do a growing share of the work that once gave lawyers their first layer of usefulness: finding the rule, producing the memo, preparing the first version, answering the standard question.

Lawyers today increasingly have to bring something beyond the baseline answer. In regulated industries, that may mean understanding institutional risk, anticipating how regulators will view a choice, knowing when a technically correct answer is still commercially or politically unwise, or helping an organization move through uncertainty without pretending the uncertainty has disappeared.

For Roberta, the future of legal work is not less serious because AI is improving. It is more demanding. The easy answers are getting easier. The hard part is proving where lawyers still add judgment, context, and value.

Roberta D'Apice is Director of Legal Affairs at Assogestioni, the Italian association for the asset management industry.

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