For years, legal conferences have been asking the same question: will AI replace lawyers?
The answer has always been more complicated than that. Technology rarely removes entire professions overnight. Instead, it changes how work is done, who does it and where value is created.
Richard Susskind has been making that point for decades. Long before ChatGPT, Claude and agentic AI entered the mainstream, he argued that both the practice and business of law would be transformed by technology.
Today, that transformation is no longer theoretical.
The interesting question is no longer whether AI will affect the legal sector. The interesting question is who benefits. And somewhat unexpectedly, compliance professionals may find themselves in a very strong position.
The legal AI race is entering a new phase
The legal sector has seen waves of innovation before. Document management systems promised to transform practice. Then came online legal services, document automation, e-disclosure platforms, legal process outsourcing, cloud computing and a succession of legal technology start-ups.
Each changed part of the market, but most followed a similar pattern. Technology companies built products and law firms bought them. This feels different.
Over recent months, there have been increasingly clear signs that the major AI companies are moving directly into the legal market.
OpenAI’s move into the legal vertical is a strong signal that legal services are becoming a strategic market in their own right, rather than simply another use case for a general-purpose model. Anthropic appears to be following a similar path, developing legal-specific capabilities and working directly with major firms to shape future products and workflows.
At the same time, some of the world’s largest law firms are no longer acting solely as customers. They are becoming participants in the development process. Firms are investing heavily in proprietary AI capabilities, strategic partnerships and internal innovation teams. The distinction between law firm, legal technology provider and AI company is beginning to blur.
That creates obvious challenges for some legal technology providers. If the underlying models become more capable and more accessible, some of the value historically provided by specialist tools may begin to migrate towards the foundation model providers themselves.
Whether that ultimately proves to be good or bad news for legal technology companies remains to be seen. The bigger point is that legal AI appears to be moving from experimentation to infrastructure.
And there is another reason why this moment feels different. Historically, if a law firm wanted a bespoke technology solution, it needed developers, significant budgets and long implementation timescales.
Today, increasingly powerful models and agent-building tools mean that firms can create their own AI-powered workflows in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost.
So the question is no longer whether firms will adopt AI. The question is how many AI-enabled processes, workflows and agents they will create themselves.
Richard Susskind has argued for many years that technology would reshape both the practice and business of law. What we may now be witnessing is the point at which that prediction moves from theory to reality.
The legal profession is not simply adopting new technology.
It is being rebuilt around it.
Every law firm is becoming a technology company
One of the most significant developments over the next few years may not be what OpenAI or Anthropic build. It may be what everyone else builds.
The emergence of agentic AI means that firms no longer need teams of software developers to automate complex processes. A reasonably capable lawyer can now create sophisticated workflows using tools powered by Claude, GPT, Gemini or other large language models.
Think about client onboarding, contextual drafting using a proprietary knowledge base, document analysis, internal knowledge systems, compliance monitoring, training and supervision.
Many of these activities can now be enhanced or partially automated using AI-powered agents, which is incredibly exciting.
It should also make firms think carefully, because these are not simply technology projects – they are regulated business processes.
An AI-powered client onboarding workflow is not just an efficiency initiative. It is also a confidentiality project, an AML project, a client care project and a governance project.
An AI-powered matter management assistant is not just a productivity tool. It is also a supervision project, a risk management project and potentially a professional conduct project.
The danger is that firms focus on what the technology can do before considering what controls need to surround it.
And that is where compliance enters the conversation.
The hidden risk in agentic AI
The appeal of modern AI is that it lowers barriers.Tasks that once required developers can increasingly be completed by operational teams, innovation teams or even enthusiastic individuals within a business.
That democratisation of technology is powerful, but it also creates risk.
A poorly designed agent could expose confidential information; a badly governed workflow could bypass existing controls; an AI system could create inaccurate communications, generate unsuitable outputs or operate in ways that become difficult to explain after the event.
In a regulated environment, these are not huge concerns. Law firms already operate within frameworks covering confidentiality, data protection, anti-money laundering, conflicts management, supervision, client care and professional conduct.
AI does not remove those obligations. If anything, it makes them more important.
The challenge for firms is not simply deploying AI, it is deploying AI safely.
Enter the compliance technologist
This is where a new professional profile may begin to emerge. For want of a better term, the compliance technologist.
Not a software engineer or a traditional compliance officer, or even a lawyer in the conventional sense. But somebody who understands how regulation, risk, operations and technology interact.
The AI-enabled legal sector needs people who can ask questions such as:
- What data is this system accessing?
- How is confidentiality being protected?
- What evidence will we retain?
- How will supervision work?
- What happens when the AI gets something wrong?
- Who owns the risk?
- How do we explain this process to a regulator?
These are governance questions as much as they are technical questions. And governance is something experienced compliance professionals understand exceptionally well.
The best Heads of Risk and Compliance, COLPs, MLROs and compliance consultants already spend much of their time translating between different stakeholder groups.
They can explain regulation to partners; they can explain operational realities to regulators; and they help firms implement compliance systems that work in practice rather than merely in theory.
Those same skills are increasingly valuable in AI projects.
A new career path?
Historically, compliance professionals have had a relatively predictable range of career options: remain within private practice, move into consultancy (hello!), or join a regulator, possibly an insurer.
The growth of legal AI may create a new route. Technology companies entering the legal market will need people who understand how law firms actually operate. Law firms building internal AI programmes will need people who understand governance and risk. Legal technology companies will need experts who can bridge the gap between engineers and legal practitioners.
Many of the most valuable contributors to these projects may not be the most technically qualified people in the room – they may be the people who have spent years understanding how legal services are delivered, supervised and regulated. The people who know where projects succeed (and fail).
Compliance’s moment in the sun?
Perhaps! Compliance professionals are rarely the stars of the legal industry. When things go well, they often remain invisible. When things go wrong, everyone suddenly wants their opinion. When a system goes wrong, they are invariably in the firing line.
AI may change that dynamic. As legal technology becomes more powerful, the challenge shifts from capability to trust.
- Can clients trust it?
- Can firms trust it?
- Can regulators trust it?
- Can boards trust it?
Those questions cannot be answered by engineers alone. They require people who understand risk, governance, accountability and professional obligations. In other words, they require compliance professionals.
Having spent years working with law firms, I find it striking that many of the conversations we are now having about AI are not really technology conversations at all. They are governance conversations.
The technology itself is moving at extraordinary speed. Every month brings a new model, a new capability or a new workflow that would have seemed impossible a year ago. What remains remarkably consistent are the underlying questions.
How do we protect confidential information?
How do we supervise work appropriately?
How do we evidence decisions?
How do we manage risk?
How do we maintain client trust?
Those are all challenges that compliance professionals have been grappling with for years.
The difference is that they are now becoming central to some of the most important strategic decisions facing law firms and legal technology providers.
For years, technology has been presented as a threat to traditional roles within the legal sector. The irony is that the next phase of legal AI may create entirely new opportunities for those who understand the profession best.
If that proves to be true, we may be about to see the emergence of a new kind of professional within the legal sector: part compliance expert, part strategist, part technologist.
And for a part of the profession that has spent much of its time working behind the scenes, that could be a very interesting place to be.
Thinking about AI in your law firm?
Whether you are exploring Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, agentic workflows or bespoke AI solutions, the challenge is rarely the technology itself. The challenge is implementing it safely within a regulated environment.
JBL Compliance works with law firms on the governance, risk, compliance and operational aspects of AI adoption, helping firms balance innovation with regulatory obligations.
If you would like to discuss your firm’s AI plans, book an initial conversation with our team.
