Beyond productivity: reimagining legal teams for the AI era

The biggest impact of AI on legal services may not be how much faster individual lawyers can work. More likely it will be about the impetus it creates for organisations and teams to redesign themselves around work, knowledge and client outcomes.

The firms that thrive in the AI era will be those that look beyond individual productivity and think more fundamentally about how legal work is structured, how knowledge flows through the organisation and how different forms of expertise come together to deliver value.

Restructuring teams around workflows

As legal roles evolve, so too must the structure of legal teams. AI does not simply sit alongside existing processes; it reshapes them. Legal work is likely to move away from models built primarily around individual expertise and professional hierarchies. Instead, more work will be organised around structured workflows that integrate data, technology and legal expertise end-to-end.

This shift is also likely to move legal teams away from purely lawyer-centric models and towards more multidisciplinary ways of working. New roles are becoming integral to legal delivery, including legal engineers, data specialists and workflow designers. These roles are central to designing, building and maintaining the systems and processes through which legal work is produced and delivered. They are not supporting functions operating at the periphery of legal services; they are becoming part of the delivery model itself.

This is an exciting emerging model in which diverse skills and perspectives are essential to delivering modern legal services and achieving the best possible outcomes for clients.

The result is a more structured and scalable model of delivery. Workflows become more consistent, processes can be improved systematically and expertise can be applied more effectively across matters and clients. And, particularly in navigating ambiguous or commercially sensitive situations, human judgement remains essential.

The evolving role of the lawyer

These teams change the nature of legal work. Within these new models, lawyers will increasingly be called on to act as orchestrators of complex systems rather than sole producers of documents - working alongside colleagues who specialise in data, workflow and product design to co-create solutions that combine legal analysis with technical execution.

A key question that will need answering is not just “how do we use AI?” but “how do we decide when to use AI, and for what?”. Responsible practice increasingly involves distinguishing between tasks where AI can safely accelerate delivery: such as summarising large volumes of information, identifying patterns in contracts, or generating first drafts of standard documents, and tasks that demand human judgement, such as advising on novel legal issues, navigating sensitive negotiations or weighing complex commercial trade-offs. Developing this discernment is itself a core professional skill in its own right.

Lawyers will increasingly need to integrate AI outputs into their reasoning without becoming dependent on them, explain transparently to clients how technology has been used, and exercise informed judgement over when human intervention is required. As explored in Legal talent 2.0: developing skills for the age of AI, developing these capabilities will become a defining challenge for the profession.

Turning knowledge into organisational capability

One of the most important opportunities created by AI lies in how organisations capture and use knowledge.

Legal organisations generate vast amounts of insight through client work, precedents, negotiations, and accumulated experience. Historically, much of that knowledge has been fragmented across individuals, teams and matters, and access often depended on knowing where to look or who to ask.

As explored in Beyond efficiency: the full value of AI in legal services, knowledge is increasingly becoming a strategic asset. The challenge for legal organisations is turning that knowledge into repeatable organisational capability.

AI creates new opportunities to make institutional knowledge more accessible and more usable. Insights from previous work can be captured, organised and applied more systematically across future matters, improving consistency and enabling teams to learn from the collective experience of the organisation rather than relying solely on individual expertise.

For legal teams to harness this opportunity effectively, they must focus not only on attracting talented people, but on creating environments where knowledge can be shared, developed and reused effectively. Expertise and insight must become embedded within systems, processes and ways of working rather than residing only with individuals, and teams will need to work collaboratively to drive that change.

Incentivising change

Transforming the workforce isn’t only a question of skills and structure. It's also a question of incentives.

Traditional law firm models have often rewarded measures such as utilisation, hours billed and volume of output. Yet as AI reduces the time required for many legal tasks, these metrics become less aligned with the value being delivered.

This calls for a different approach, one that recognises and rewards the behaviours that help drive change.

Behaviours such as knowledge sharing, process improvement, innovation and the effective use of technology are becoming increasingly important. These activities help organisations build scalable capability, allowing improvements to be applied repeatedly across teams, matters and client relationships.

Early signs of this shift are already visible across the legal sector. Simmons & Simmons, for example, recently introducted a bonus scheme recognising the meaningful use of generative AI. This reflects a wider trend: organisations are exploring ways to recognise lawyers and professionals who contribute to innovation, improve workflows and help organisations adopt new technologies effectively.

Without the right incentives, transformation remains difficult to sustain. But with them, organisations can create a culture where continuous improvement becomes part of everyday work rather than a separate initiative.

Conclusion

The future of legal services will not be shaped by technology alone. It will be shaped by how organisations choose to respond to it.

AI does not diminish the importance of individual expertise – in fact it increases it. But it will change how that expertise is best deployed.

As the legal industry continues to evolve, organisations that embrace multidisciplinary delivery models will be better positioned to respond to changing client expectations, competitive pressures and technological advances.

The defining question for the next generation of legal organisations may not be who has access to the best technology. It may be who is best able to organise knowledge, talent and judgement around it.