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While artificial intelligence has seen widespread adoption across the legal sector, studies have found that this uptake into genuine transformation continues to pose a major hurdle.
Ahead of the College of Law’s Centre for Legal Innovation 2026 Future of Law Report data/roundtable findings and summit launch on 20 October, Alison Laird, director of innovation at the College of Law, talked to Lawyers Weekly.
Laird noted that traditional operating models, fragmented data, and concerns around risk and accountability are slowing the redesign of legal services.
As AI reshapes the profession, Laird argued that organisations must expand beyond individual productivity gains to reconsider workflows, measure value, and build the basics for scalable implementation.
While AI competence is expected to become an integral aspect for lawyers, Laird said human qualities, including critical thinking, professional judgement, and empathy, will remain paramount to the future of law.
Is AI delivering legal transformation?
Laird highlighted that while the legal profession has embraced AI, it is yet to turn widespread adoption into meaningful changes to service delivery.
“I think we’ve solved the adoption question because lots of people are using it, but I don’t think we’ve solved the transformation problem,” Laird said.
“It’s really easy to get people using AI and improving individual productivity, but it’s much more difficult to redesign service.
“The standard traditional operating model is built around individual lawyers – it’s not built around end-to-end workflows.
“There’s a lot of individual productivity happening, which is great, but we’re just not seeing it transitioning into that service or workflow redesign.”
Laird noted that inconsistent data, legacy systems, and gaps in governance are also preventing legal organisations from scaling AI at an effective level.
“People would jump really quickly to think that we need AI, experiment, play, have fun; but they’ve sort of missed one of the foundation steps of their data.
“AI is only going to create value when it removes friction from the system, not just minutes from a task,” she said.
Human skills remain central
As AI reshapes legal practice, Laird noted that the future is not about replacing lawyers, but equipping them to work effectively alongside emerging technologies.
“It’s not sort of AI instead of lawyers, it’s lawyers plus AI, one of the key survey results that came out was saying that 88 per cent said that they were thinking that AI competence is going to become a professional obligation,” Laird said.
“There [are] still some very inherently human skills that remain the essence of good lawyering.
According to Laird, human traits such as interpersonal abilities, critical reasoning, and professional judgement will remain vital to practising law effectively alongside growing AI adoption.
“It’s about your professional judgement, your critical thinking in context and nuance,” Laird said.
“The empathy and emotion that humans have, that communication and the ability to be able to connect with each other.
“Also, I think probably the accountability, like that ethical side, where the trust lies.
“All those things came up in the research as one of the strongest areas across all of the different cohorts that we looked at, as in agreements about capabilities for the future.”
