Here’s a twist on the robots-are-coming story. Dentons Ireland and Silicon Republic sat down with legal leaders at Mastercard, Gilead, eir and others, and almost nobody said AI had replaced a role. What it has done is hand everyone else a drafting machine. Grievances, subject access requests and customer complaints now arrive long, polished and AI-written, and someone in legal has to work out which paragraph actually matters.
One senior counsel described a call where five colleagues showed up with six AI opinions on one regulatory question. Fun! Add token-metered pricing that makes the AI bill hard to forecast, and the ROI slide gets awkward. The upside for in-house lawyers: judgment looks more valuable, not less. If you’re thinking about the future of the in-house role, this beats most surveys…
“AI isn’t replacing in-house lawyers, but the capacity it frees up is being absorbed by new work, much of it drafted by AI itself.”
