Guest post by Bjarne P Tellmann, CEO of FjordStream Advisors and a senior visiting fellow at the London School of Economics
Tellman: Clients are transforming
Much of the discussion about AI in the legal industry focuses on technology: which tools to adopt and which tasks might get automated.
But this misses the deeper story.
The primary driver of change is not AI itself. It is the transformation underway inside corporations. The growing structural incompatibility between AI-era corporate operating models and the analogue structures of most law firms is widening.
The mismatch is already here
AI is a general-purpose technology, like steam or electricity in earlier eras, capable of reshaping entire industries and redefining how companies are structured and create value.
Corporations are reorganising themselves around AI models that continuously learn, rapidly experiment, and automate decision-making at scale. As they do, their legal departments are also evolving, widening the gap between what clients require and what law firms are structurally designed to deliver.
Against this backdrop, two challenges define the modern general counsel.
The first concerns risk. Traditional risk models have given way to more dynamic and holistic approaches, requiring legal advice that spans operational, reputational, regulatory, and geopolitical dimensions.
The second is the perennial ‘more for less’ challenge: delivering more work, faster and more efficiently, at lower cost. AI is accelerating both dynamics.
Law firms, however, still serve clients as though nothing fundamental has changed. Many still operate through siloed teams, manual coordination and labour-intensive billing models.
This model may have made sense in a slower, analogue environment, but it will struggle in the AI-era, resulting in a growing friction in speed, accountability and the ability to translate legal insight into business action.
The traditional law firm model has been extraordinarily successful. But incumbents often struggle at technological inflection points because disruption is hard to detect until the market has shifted.
This is a structural challenge that efficiency improvements alone will not solve.
What redesign actually looks like
Some legal departments are already showing what AI lawyering looks like.
When JP Morgan rolled out its contract intelligence platform COIN, it reduced contract review time by approximately 360,000 hours annually while reportedly saving the bank approximately $150m in fraud-related losses in its first year alone.
More importantly, it became a springboard for broader AI adoption across legal and compliance, freeing lawyers for higher order work.
Workday’s legal, compliance and corporate affairs function offers another example. Rather than treating AI as a standalone project, it rebuilt its operating model around a unified data platform connecting workflows, analytics, matter management and enterprise systems into a single ecosystem.
Legal data now integrates directly into broader enterprise workflows, enabling faster functional decision-making, placing legal more directly into the company.
These are early examples of what digitally transformed clients look like.
Integration and orchestration over siloed specialisation
The implications for law firms are significant.
Firms that continue to provide fragmented specialist input risk being pushed progressively further from the client’s operational core because they remain unable to integrate with AI-enabled clients.
Increasingly, clients view outside providers not as standalone advisers but as interoperable nodes within broader technology-enabled operating models.
Firm value will depend not only on legal expertise, but on how seamlessly firms can operate within client workflows, data environments and decision-making cadences.
Technology-enabled sourcing providers, such as Priori Legal and PERSUIT, already connect clients with lawyers based on specific needs.
But these models are also well positioned to evolve into AI-era legal platforms because they already possess the essential ingredients: clients, suppliers and integrating technologies. Over time, they may become orchestration layers managing routing, selection, pricing and performance.
As legal departments increasingly build intake systems to triage work automatically, such platforms could integrate directly into the routing and bidding architecture of both clients and providers.
The result could be a holistic, technology-enabled value chain in which work is intelligently triaged and routed in real time.
As that emerges, the central strategic question for law firms will increasingly centre around how well they are embedded within these client ecosystems.
The human element rises, not falls
Ironically, AI may increase the importance of distinctly human capabilities.
As AI systems handle routine and process-driven tasks, competitive advantage shifts upward toward judgement, synthesis, stakeholder alignment and contextual decision-making across multi-dimensional risk environments.
Clients will still need excellent lawyers. But increasingly they also need advisers who can navigate ambiguity, align stakeholders and exercise judgement in environments across porous risk vectors.
The firms that thrive will not merely use AI to become more efficient. They will reconfigure their models to integrate closely with clients, delivering advice at the pace and scale of AI.
Transformation begins with the client. Everything else flows from that.
This article draws on Bjarne P Tellmann’s new book Law in the Era of AI: Clients, Firms, and the Future of the Legal Industry [1] (Wiley, 2026). He previously served as founding general counsel and executive committee member at Haleon PLC and as chief legal officer and general counsel at Pearson PLC.