Prime Highlights
- In-house legal teams are expanding their use of new technology to handle routine work faster and more independently.
- Companies are focusing on strengthening safeguards and training to ensure these tools support high-quality legal work.
Key Facts
- Many legal tasks, including contract reviews and early case assessments, are becoming easier to automate and complete internally.
- Legal leaders are updating internal processes and governance frameworks to match the growing use of technology.
Background
In-house legal teams at major companies are quickly adopting new technology to speed up routine legal tasks and take on more work themselves. After recognising the technology’s potential to improve accuracy and reduce costs, legal teams are now moving from early trials to broader, more ambitious use.
Many routine legal tasks, such as reviewing contracts and doing early checks on cases, are turning out to be easy to automate. Most legal teams say the changes are gradual, not dramatic, but the new tools are already influencing how legal work is managed. As this happens, leaders are also focusing on adding proper safeguards, strengthening internal guidelines and making sure staff receive the right training.
At Salesforce, chief legal officer Sabastian Niles is guiding a push to design “AI agents” capable of taking over multi-step tasks with minimal human input. His department has helped build the compliance safeguards that sit inside the company’s autonomous AI tools, ensuring strict limits and monitoring systems are in place. The legal team has also created AI-driven compliance agents and tools that help the sales division manage routine queries without diverting lawyers from higher-value work.
Fast-moving, heavily regulated industries are embracing these developments most rapidly. Nasdaq’s legal team, which advises across capital markets and technology operations, has restructured to improve coordination on emerging regulatory and risk issues. Chief legal officer John Zecca believes AI will bring even more legal work in-house over time, allowing company teams to handle early discovery and due diligence before bringing in outside law firms for specialist advice.
Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike has also seen clear benefits. Chief legal officer Cathleen Anderson says AI tools now allow her team to complete early case assessments quickly and enter discussions with external counsel better prepared. With more than 100 AI tools in various stages of development, the company’s lawyers have been encouraged to lead AI adoption across the business.
Lawyers are learning to work more like product managers, overseeing development cycles, refining tools, and ensuring human judgment remains part of every major decision. At Salesforce, Niles says that understanding how to balance automation with human insight will become a core skill for the legal profession in the years ahead.
