0%

The Legal Ops Lens
29 Okt. 2025 Insight Global
Article

Welcome to the first edition of the Legal Ops Lens - a quarterly roundup designed to help legal leaders stay informed and inspired. Think of it as a light-touch guide on the latest legal operations trends, and what might be worth exploring next for your legal function.

We aim to bring diverse perspectives and a holistic view of innovation to support legal leaders in navigating complex challenges and driving strategic value. Each edition curates key insights drawn from across the legal operations landscape - including recent conferences, market research, and industry commentary and conversations – as well as incorporating the most recent thinking from adjacent disciplines such as business and technology transformation. These key insights are paired with tactical tips you can adapt to your own pace and priorities.

Inside, we share two lenses:

  • The Market Lens: A synthesis of what we're hearing across the industry - emerging trends, common challenges and shifts in strategic focus.
  • The Winning Strategies Lens: Our own practical insights into what's working on the ground, drawn from our own depth of experience working with in-house legal functions and designed to offer a valuable springboard for shaping your next move.

In this quarter's edition, we bring you insights from three months that delivered a rich mix of market signals – from the buzz of LegalTechTalk and the CLOC Australia Summit, to the strategic relevance of the Financial Times Innovative Lawyers Conference and insights emerging from new research and industry white papers.

GenAI Isn’t a Silver Bullet - Structure is the Real Enabler

GenAI continues to dominate the conversation, but a consistent theme this quarter is that its impact depends heavily on the operational foundations it's built on. From data hygiene to process clarity, it's the underlying strategic and operational structure – not just the tech – that determines how transformative AI can be.

  • BCG – From Potential to Profit: Closing the AI Impact Gap: BCG highlights that the intuitive, friendly feel of GenAI can often mask the discipline, commitment, and hard work required to introduce these technologies into the workplace. Despite continued investments, they identify that leading companies are actually those placing fewer 'AI bets' and instead focusing on both high-impact use cases for their teams, as well as laying the operational foundations required for GenAI to thrive. They note the '10-20-70' principle as key - 10% of efforts on algorithms, 20% on data and technology and a huge 70% on people, processes and cultural transformation.
  • MIT (NANDA) - The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025 and Law.com -Beyond Pilots: Smarter Paths to Generative AI in Law Firms: MIT has reported a critical pattern in the GenAI landscape: the 'enterprise paradox', where large organisations lead in pilot volume but lag in scaling success. This is underscored in the legal context by Law.com, which states that many legal teams remain stuck in "pilot purgatory" as a result of setting off with no clear direction, other than to be using a GenAI tool. The authors point to the drawbacks in running isolated experiments not anchored in strategic direction or operational integration.
  • LegalTechTalk roundtable (Generative AI: Between Promise and Practice) and CLOC Australia Summit: One of the strongest themes emerging from our recent LegalTechTalk roundtable and discussions at the CLOC Australia Summit was the critical role of cross-functional collaboration in moving GenAI from pilot to practice. Live polling at the roundtable revealed a shared view among General Counsel and senior Legal Operations leaders: legal teams working in isolation struggle to scale GenAI meaningfully. Instead, those partnering early with IT, data, compliance, and operations teams are seeing stronger traction. Both conferences highlighted that cross-functional groups help shape the structural foundations GenAI needs by bringing operational context, challenging assumptions, and co-design solutions that are not only technically sound but also embedded in real workflows.

  • Don't treat GenAI as a standalone experiment. To unlock its full potential, embed legal GenAI strategy into broader transformation programmes, anchored by clear governance, aligned priorities, and a strong understanding of where it fits within team operations. Taking the time to lay the groundwork through thoughtful planning and early exploratory work, including setting a clear hypothesis that your pilot is in place to test, will serve as a strategic North Star. This approach ensures GenAI initiatives are not only innovative, but also purposeful and scalable.
  • Remain grounded. Sustainable GenAI adoption begins with identifying use cases that solve real pain points and deliver measurable outcomes. High-volume, repeatable tasks - such as NDA review and clause comparison - offer fertile ground for early wins.  To move beyond experimentation alone, apply a structured assessment framework that considers at least these three factors:
    • Operational scalability – Can the use case be standardised across teams and jurisdictions, and does it have relevance for adjacent use cases? For example, if one contract review pilot works, can it be extended across other contract types or business units?
    • Integration capability – Can the solution be embedded into workflows in a way that enhances how the legal team operates? Real value comes from reimagining streamlined and intuitive workflows to be GenAI-optimised from the ground up.
    • Change leadership – Is there a clear plan to guide required behavioural shifts, not just tool implementation? Scaling GenAI requires more than technical deployment, it demands active sponsorship, targeted training and ongoing support to help teams adapt to new ways of working. Building digital literacy through tailored learning pathways is not just a technical imperative - it’s a strategic enabler for scalable and inclusive AI adoption.

      The result? Sustainable progress, stronger stakeholder engagement, and tools that deliver real impact. Structure, not speed, is proving to be the real differentiator.
       
  • Build together, win together. Bring together cross-functional expertise to achieve stronger traction and faster scaling. By forming an AI enablement team that includes legal operations, IT, compliance, procurement, and change management expertise, legal teams can ensure that GenAI initiatives are technically sound, operationally viable, and strategically aligned. This team should be tasked with jointly assessing use cases, aligning on governance and mapping out implementation pathways - from tooling selection to workflow integration and user onboarding.

Lead the Change, Build the Culture, Scale the Impact

Tech doesn’t transform legal teams - people do. Sustainable transformation depends on active change leadership, not just new tools. Whether it’s process redesign, tech deployment, or strategy development, success hinges on leaders who can inspire, guide and embed change.

  • Harvard Business Review – Leading Through Continuous Change: HBR highlights that transformation in professional services often begins at ground level, where teams can face low digital literacy, internal resistance, and budgetary hurdles. Without visible and sustained leadership, efforts risk leading to change fatigue - a state where repeated initiatives, unclear direction, and uneven support erode engagement and trust. HBR emphasises that executives must anticipate emotional responses, communicate consistently, and remain actively involved throughout the journey.
  • McKinsey – Reconfiguring work: Change Management in the age of GenAI: Successful change leadership in the AI era requires mobilising people, not just deploying tools. Leaders must empower employees to become active participants, co-creating solutions and adapting workflows. McKinsey highlights that involving at least 7% of employees in transformation efforts doubles the chance of success. Crucially, middle-out leadership, where managers and superusers drive change alongside executives - ensures adoption is co-created, embedded and sustained. Change leadership in the GenAI era is a shared responsibility.
  • Association of Legal Administrators - Legal Management - Managing Change with Empathy (Legal Management Talk Podcast): This podcast highlights how empathetic change management can drive real buy-in across legal professionals. It stresses the need to meet people where they are, delivering practical, bite-sized training - especially for those without formal management experience - and creating safe spaces to build confidence before applying new skills. In hybrid environments, it’s crucial to make workplace expectations explicit to avoid misunderstandings and foster team alignment when introducing change so you can maximise buy-in.

  • Invest in Change. To scale transformation successfully, high-performing legal teams treat change as a strategic capability, not an afterthought - prioritising training, user support and leadership alignment. Prosci highlights that making a strategic investment in the 'people side' of change can help teams to avoid 'unexpected resistance and the need for redesign and rework' - protecting project budget in the long run. In recent client engagements, we have seen that even well-funded transformation programmes falter when change leadership is introduced too late or too narrowly. The most effective teams embed behavioural nudges, clear communication and leadership buy-in from day one.
  • Set the tone. When legal and business leaders sponsor change together, it signals that innovation is a shared priority, helps to secure resources and removes project barriers. But sponsorship must go beyond approval - it requires modelling new behaviours, allocating resources, and creating space for iteration. As explored in our recent market poll and article, transformation accelerates when the culture actively supports experimentation, curiosity, and calculated risk-taking.
  • Embed change agents. Embedding change agents within delivery teams - not just at the programme level - helps bridge the gap between strategy and execution. These individuals play a critical role in surfacing resistance, reinforcing new behaviours, and ensuring that transformation is felt at every layer of the organisation. To maximise their impact, consider the following tactical approaches:
    • Position change agents within core delivery squads. This allows them to build trust with the broader team, understand day-to-day realities, and respond to change resistance in real time.
    • Equip them with clear mandates and authority to escalate blockers, reinforce new behaviours, and influence decision-making. Change agents should be empowered - not just informed.
    • Use pulse checks and informal feedback loops to help change agents surface early signs of fatigue, confusion, or disengagement. These insights can be fed back into programme governance to adjust pace and messaging.
    • Ensure leadership visibility and sponsorship is felt at the team level. Change agents can amplify executive messaging, but they need senior leaders to show up - through town halls, drop-ins, or direct engagement with delivery teams.
    • Recognise and reward change leadership at all levels. Celebrating those who champion new ways of working helps build momentum and reinforces the cultural shift.

Clarity can beat capability in legal tech selection

With a crowded marketplace made up of both established and emerging technologies, legal teams are navigating a landscape of overlapping capabilities, fast-evolving features, and vendor hype. The challenge isn’t just choosing the right tool, it’s knowing what “right” even looks like. Successful teams don't chase functionality - they focus on clarity. They invest time upfront to define needs, align stakeholders and evaluate tools against strategic criteria. In today's saturated market, clarity of purpose and structured selection are what separate smart investments from expensive distractions.

  • Fortune Business Insights: FBI projects the global legal technology market will nearly double by 2032, growing from $33.97 billion in 2025 to $63.59 billion. This explosive growth underscores both opportunity and increasing saturation - making it harder than ever for legal teams to cut through the noise. With new tools launching constantly and existing platforms expanding their feature sets, the risk of investing based on hype or instinct is high. In this environment, structured evaluation and strategic clarity as no longer optional - they're essential.
  • The GC Legal Tech Pulse 2025: The recent surge in legal tech solutions is being fuelled by momentum around AI – and with good reason. A recent survey by Legal500 and Thomson Reuters found that the perception of AI as a reliable legal resource has nearly doubled within the GC community, rising from 21% to 40% in just one year. As confidence grows and the tangible benefits of Generative AI become clearer, the challenge is no longer whether to engage, but where to place your bets. With a crowded vendor landscape (though with signs of emerging market consolidation), legal teams face increasing pressure to cut through the noise and make strategic, evidence-based decisions.
  • ShareDo – LegalTechTalk 2025 recap: From tech bloat to strategic ecosystems: ShareDo's recap highlights a growing concern: 'tech bloat'. As platforms expand through ‘capacity creep’, many tools now claim to do a little bit more of everything, leading to overlapping systems and underutilised features. The shift from reactive tech selection to strategic stack design is gaining momentum, with leading teams prioritising people-led, data-first, and security-conscious approaches. The lesson? Success lies not in having more tech, but in having the right tech, chosen with clarity.

  • Legal teams thrive when their tech decisions are grounded in strategy, not urgency. Now more than ever, structured evaluation criteria are essential to cut through complexity, support confident investment choices, and ensure that tech decisions satisfy immediate needs and support long-term goals. The most effective teams have moved well beyond functional checklists, applying criteria that reflect legal and business priorities, integration potential, user experience and support, and long-term scalability. This shift isn't new - it's a proven approach that continues to gain traction as tech stacks grow more complex and the pressure to demonstrate ROI intensifies. While recent discussions at LegalTechTalk and the CLOC Australia Summit reinforced this trend, it reflects a broader industry understanding: thoughtful, strategic evaluation is what makes tech truly work for legal teams.
  • A win-win scenario. Opportunity lies in identifying platforms that serve both legal and business use cases - unlocking shared investment, broader buy-in, and enterprise-wide impact. When legal and business teams align on tech decisions, it not only strengthens the case for investment but also ensures that solutions are embedded into wider workflows, driving adoption and amplifying value across the organisation.
  • Future-proof your frameworks. The most forward-looking teams who shared top tips with us at the Financial Times Innovative Lawyers Summit are building reusable evaluation frameworks - not just for one-off decisions, but as part of a broader operating model. These frameworks create consistency across regions, reduce decision fatigue, and help legal teams respond confidently to new technology opportunities as the market evolves.

Legal functions are under pressure to do more with less, to guide stakeholders through a rapidly changing landscape, and to drive business-aligned transformation. We can help.

Our Legal Operations Advisory practice was established to support in-house legal functions of all sizes, maturities and sectors effectively navigate change and solve complex problems.

Our team provide the skills, expertise and resources to ensure your legal function operates efficiently and effectively to deliver your strategic goals.

We strive to be true operational business partners to you, delivering against your current needs whilst also identifying opportunities to achieve your longer-term ambitions.

We are Band 1 ranked in Legal Transformation Consulting - Chambers & Partners New Law Guide 2025: Global-Wide

 

Subscribe to the series

Click below to subscribe to future editions of the Legal Ops Lens

Subscribe

Key contacts

Clara Garfield photo

Clara Garfield

Head of Legal Operations Advisory, Digital Legal Delivery, UK, London

View profile
Eimear Mullan photo

Eimear Mullan

Manager, Digital Legal Delivery, London

View profile
Tuna Kutsal photo

Tuna Kutsal

Head of Legal Operations Advisory, Digital Legal Delivery, Sydney

View profile

Legal Notice

The contents of this publication are for reference purposes only and may not be current as at the date of accessing this publication. They do not constitute legal advice and should not be relied upon as such. Specific legal advice about your specific circumstances should always be sought separately before taking any action based on this publication.

© Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer 2026

Stay in the know

Receive timely insights and briefings from HSF Kramer, tailored to keep you informed and ahead

Subscribe now
London Digital Legal Delivery Emerging technology AI and Emerging Technologies Clara Garfield Eimear Mullan Tuna Kutsal