Source: Forbes
The legal industry is in the throes of a “gradually, then suddenly” transformation. The story has two central plot lines. The first involves the business of law and the second the profession. This article examines each thread separately, then explains why their convergence is the legal transformation story. The ramifications of its outcome will extend far beyond the legal profession and industry.
Legal transformation is a business story that has unfolded gradually—until recently. Business is reimagining the legal function to meet enterprise and customer needs in the digital/AI-era. This entails the integration of legal into the wider enterprise transformation journey by leveraging its critical thinking, problem solving, data, and institutional/customer knowledge across the enterprise and customers. The process has taken root in the in-house setting but will soon extend across its supply chain. This is the transformation of legal delivery at scale (a/k/a “the business of law”).
Astonishing advances in AI have further accelerated the pace and expanded the scope of legal paradigm change. AI’s coming of age marks the beginning of the end for human hegemony of “brain work,” research, critical thinking, and problem solving, among other cognitive skills. This will forever change work, the workforce, the workplace, and the human-machine relationship. So too will it fundamentally alter the role of professionals. AI will recast the delivery of legal services by exponentially increasing the speed, breadth, and output of “legal” (and other professional) work. It will also fundamentally change delivery economics, alter the structure(s) of legacy providers, reconfigure linear career trajectories, and refashion the purpose and role of humans in the delivery of legal and other professional services.
Legal transformation has generally been associated with the business of delivering legal services, not the profession. That’s because delivery is centered on the economic impact of law’s transition from an artisanal, lawyer-centric, siloed guild to a scaled, data-backed, tech-enabled multidisciplinary, enterprise value driver. The business of law is about its bottom line, and that is the currency of our time.
Read the full article by Mark Cohen, CEO of Legal Mosaic: https://www.forbes.com/sites/markcohen1/2025/05/12/legal-transformation-why-the-stakes-have-increased-dramatically/
