Beyond Speed: Rethinking the Role of AI, Efficiency, and Judgment in Legal Practice
- cosmonauts
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
Technological innovation is reshaping legal work - but not always in the ways lawyers expect.
Yoann Lewkowitz, Global Innovation Lead at Linklaters, shares a candid perspective on how GenAI is intensifying efficiency pressures across the legal profession, why tech fluency matters more than technical skill, and where the real long-term value of innovation lies.
In this Q&A, Yoann reflects on the risks, benefits, and unintended consequences of AI adoption, and why innovation leaders must refocus the conversation from speed to strategic value.
Enjoy the interview below.
How do you personally feel recent technological innovations have reshaped the day-to-day expectations placed on legal professionals?
The general trend with every technological innovation that came to the legal market has been to push for faster and cheaper services. This happened with the introduction of emails, redlining, e-discovery tools etc. GenAI is multiplying this effect across the whole legal stack. This trend is mainly driven by the hype / threat that GenAI is coming to dislocate the junior end of all white-collar jobs, so lawyers are clearly in scope. We are witnessing the emergence of an efficiency paradox where clients expect that the time saved thanks to technology will immediately translate into lower costs and instantaneous delivery. Mid-level private practice and in-house lawyers are likely to be the segment of the market that will feel the pressure the most, in particular because the tools are not accurate enough to be trusted but the expectation is undeniable. For the less tech savvy, it could become overwhelming and, in general, it will likely exacerbate the current mental pressure that legal professionals already struggle with.
Technological innovation should be deployed to allow lawyers to think outside of the box and focus on high-value strategic advice, but it is mainly applied to increase efficiency. For the less diligent practitioners, this pressure is pushing lawyers to cut corners to meet this expectation. Unfortunately, the cautionary tales of professionals submitting unreviewed AI generated submissions to various courts and clients are not isolated events.
I believe that our role as innovation leaders is to refocus the conversation on the value that lawyers can unlock thanks to technological innovations and how this can improve the quality of their services rather than the velocity of their delivery. The gold mine is in data analytics, the valuable expectation should be that legal professionals can now access a wealth of unstructured data about the market and their clients that must be used to augment their capabilities to act as strategic advisers.
To what degree do you believe technological competence should be considered a core skill for legal professionals?
In my view, the technological competence that must become a core skill is Tech fluency rather than Tech capabilities. I believe that a core skill for lawyers is to be able to speak the language of innovation (not necessarily be able to write of vibe the code that powers it) in order to set the right targets for the solutions that they use in their day-to-day workflows. This skill is actually more relevant for the more senior members of the profession because they set the expectations. It is particularly important with the current cycle of GenAI, we have seen how low is the barrier to entry with this technology, anybody can use it without any technical background. It is probably the first time that it is even possible to use the technology itself to teach you how to use it.
That being said, it is crucial that we set the right expectations: our profession remains a fundamentally human business, built on trust, nuance and judgment. We should not expect lawyers to become developers or product managers, it would be a misuse of their talent. Instead, the core skill is the ability to leverage technology to gain a 360-degree view of a client’s business and their industry. When a lawyer is fluent in the available tools, they can strip away the administrative friction and focus entirely on the quality of their advice. The goal is to use these advancements to deepen our understanding of the client's commercial reality and ensure that while the tools can add a lot of value, the intelligence we deliver is fundamentally human.
How do you assess the risks and benefits of adopting new legal technology in a corporate environment?
We need to view this through two distinct lenses: the institutional challenge to harness Invisible AI without fuelling Shadow AI and the individual challenge to gain efficiency without suffering skill erosion.
From the institutional perspective, the greatest benefit is the Invisible AI that allows lawyers to organise unstructured data and capture firm’s institutional knowledge. However, the risk lies in the procurement process, we need to strike the right balance between deploying cutting-edge solutions and maintaining rigorous cybersecurity standards. When too slow or conservative, we inadvertently create a frustration gap, if internal tools lag behind what is available publicly, we drive employees toward Shadow AI. On the other hand, the tech providers have to be vetted properly to make sure that their security protocols match ours and that they are solid enough to invest time and money to integrate them into our corporate environment tech stack.
At the individual level, the benefits are obvious: automating mundane tasks frees up lawyers to focus on the high-value strategic work that I mentioned above. The main human risk here is complacency. If we become over-reliant on technology, we risk a gradual erosion of core skills, particularly among junior staff who need to learn by doing. If a junior lawyer lacks the fundamental knowledge to spot a GenAI hallucination or error, they pass flawed work up the value chain, which effectively increases the workload of the more senior members of the team. With that in mind and thanks to the versatility of the technology, we can make use of new legal technology solutions to supercharge junior training and counterbalance that risk.
In your opinion, which legal tasks are most likely to be fully automated within the next five years, and why?
In my opinion we will be moving from automation of content generation to the automation of process execution. As previously alluded to, drafting and advice is embedded in client context and is the value that lawyers add. Gradually, a number of administrative tasks have ended up on their plate, these tasks must be fully automated because they shouldn’t be the purview of lawyers in the first place.
While the last two years were defined by GenAI assisting in drafting, the next five will be defined by AI powered workflows optimising matter management. The latest LegalTech developments are now making it possible to easily build bespoke automated workflows. However, we must draw a hard line between automating tasks and automating responsibilities. While I believe mundane and admin tasks should be fully automated, keeping the human in the loop is non-negotiable. Without clear audit trail and in-flow checks, the risk is that as the doing becomes invisible, the checking becomes impossible. If AI Agents are unleashed to interact with each other on multiple sides of the table, it will create systemic, regulatory and ethical risks, such as market manipulation, collusion etc. and it will become challenging to allocate liability effectively.
What insights are you hoping to gain from your attendance at Future Lawyer UK?
I am looking forward to being challenged on my views of the industry and evaluate my strategic assumptions against the positions of my peers in the market. Bringing together a community of innovation leaders who are navigating the same questions is always extremely valuable. I am keen on finding out how other innovation leaders and market players address AI governance and drive safe adoption from a technical and mainly human angle.
Yoann’s insights challenge a common assumption in legal innovation: that faster automatically means better. Instead, he argues for a more deliberate approach-one that protects core skills, strengthens governance, and uses technology to elevate legal judgment rather than replace it.
Yoann will be joining the panel “The AI-Ready Lawyer: Talent Sourcing, Training, and Retention in a Changing Legal Market” at Future Lawyer UK to continue this conversation alongside other senior legal and innovation leaders exploring how AI is reshaping talent, skills, and expectations across the profession.
Register now to join the discussion at Future Lawyer UK.
Comments