The Legal Professional’s Next Job Is to Build an Intelligence Advantage

From where I sit as general counsel, I don’t think about AI models, agents, and skills as separate technologies. I think about what my team needs to make the right decision.

That starts with authoritative legal intelligence and also everything our organization already knows: our agreements, policies, precedents, risk positions, prior decisions, and institutional expertise. Law firms face the same underlying challenge: how to combine authoritative legal intelligence, firm knowledge, client context, and professional judgment around a matter.

Today, too much time is spent finding that information, moving it between systems, rebuilding context, and turning it into usable work. New AI models, skills, and applications arrive every week, and none of them fix that on their own.

Lawyers do not experience their work as a stack of AI technologies. They experience a matter, a negotiation, a regulation, a decision the business needs by the end of the week. What matters more today is whether the technology can organize itself around the work: bringing together the right intelligence and context, applying the best capabilities to the matter at hand, and carrying the work forward.

When it does, the opportunity changes. For law firms, this means using intelligence to deepen expertise, preserve institutional knowledge, and deliver greater value to clients. For general counsel, our next job is not simply to make the legal department more efficient. It is to build an intelligence advantage.

That advantage means getting to the right authority, bringing institutional knowledge into the analysis, applying that intelligence consistently across the legal team, moving faster from issue to insight to decision to finished work, and removing friction without removing judgment.

The opportunity now goes well beyond efficiency. A fully integrated Intelligence Engine that drives a complete AI system delivers consequential outcomes: next-level work that once required far more time and coordination; professional-grade decisions grounded in both authoritative legal intelligence and organizational context; and transformative economic impact through greater internal capacity, expertise applied at scale, and risks, rights and commercial opportunities surfaced earlier.

Next-level work
The efficiency version of this story is that AI reads a contract portfolio faster than a team of associates could. The more interesting version is what becomes possible when all of it works together on one problem.

When a new regulation lands, my first question is not simply what it says. It is which of our agreements, products, markets, and commitments it touches, what has changed, and where we need to act first. This used to mean commissioning a project: scoping, staffing, and weeks of work. Now, it can begin as a simple question because the system can bring the matter documents, the legal research, our own prior positions, and the current external picture into one line of analysis, apply different capabilities to different parts of it, verify the supporting authority, and produce the fully formatted memo, spreadsheet, or presentation the matter requires.

Next-level work is not simply doing the same task faster. It is taking on more complex work, carrying more context through it, and getting to something the legal team and the business can act on sooner.

Professional-grade decisions
The profession has spent considerable time debating which AI model is smartest. The debate will continue, and the models will keep changing.

No experienced legal professional signs off on a consequential decision based on a model alone. From the general counsel’s seat, I need to know what the law says, whether the authority is current, and whether the citations exist and say what they are claimed to say. We need to know what the organization has done before, what risk it has historically accepted, what the relevant contract says, and that our confidential information stayed protected.

This is why the intelligence that surrounds the model matters more than the model itself. A regulatory development can be connected to the products, contracts, and jurisdictions it affects. A litigation outcome can be viewed alongside judicial history and the company’s existing exposure. A lawyer facing a new issue can draw on the organization’s prior positions without depending on whether the person who handled the last matter happens to be available.

That is how institutional knowledge becomes institutional capability. It is also how legal moves earlier into the decision. The value is not merely answering the question the business asks. It is seeing the question before the business knows to ask it.

Transformative economic impact
Legal AI has been sold almost entirely on productivity: fewer hours, less repetitive work, lower spend. Those savings are real, and I will take them. They are only the beginning.

When intelligence is connected, the economics change. Matters that went to outside counsel because we lacked the capacity to run them come back in. Expertise that once depended on a particular lawyer can be applied more consistently across the organization. Work that was once too expensive to perform may become commercially viable.

Law firms face the same shift from the other side. The question is not only what becomes possible, but how firms create and demonstrate value when more of the underlying work can be completed faster. The opportunity is to apply firm expertise more consistently, bring institutional knowledge to every matter, expand the range of work that is economically viable and focus lawyers’ time on judgment, strategy and client advice.

More interesting is the value already sitting in the organization, unclaimed. Rights in agreements no one has exercised. Terms that warrant renegotiation. A regulatory change that opens a commercial opportunity rather than creating a risk. Patterns across disputes and negotiations that reveal something about a counterparty or a market that no single matter would show.

That is a different proposition from saving thirty minutes on a draft. It is legal intelligence becoming an asset the business can act on.

The advantage has to be governed
The strongest legal AI systems will not simply become more autonomous. They will combine greater capability with authoritative grounding, verification, permissions, security, and professional oversight.

For general counsel and law firm leaders alike, that governance is not a technical detail. Deciding which sources carry authority, what these systems can reach and who can reach it, and what must be verified before it is relied on is what determines whether AI remains another collection of tools to manage or becomes an intelligence advantage that can be put to work.

The opportunity is to bring together the best technology, the best external intelligence and everything the organization knows, then turn that combination into next-level work, professional-grade decisions and transformative economic impact.

That is a much bigger ambition than making lawyers more efficient. It is the advantage legal professionals should be building now.

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For media inquiries about this post, please contact Jill Van Nostran, jill.vannostran@lexisnexis.com