How legal teams create value in the age of agentic AI

Artificial intelligence is entering a new phase. While earlier waves of adoption focused on tools that assist with individual tasks, emerging agent-enabled systems are shifting attention towards more coordinated, workflow-level forms of support.

For legal teams, the implications extend beyond efficiency. As agents become embedded within legal processes, value may depend less on access to AI tools and more on how effectively legal expertise, business context and governance can be combined within scalable delivery models. This is not about removing human expertise from legal delivery. It is about applying that expertise differently, with lawyers remaining central to the judgement, relationships and accountability on which effective legal services depend.

While this remains a rapidly evolving area, a direction of travel is beginning to emerge. In this article, we explore six key shifts and what they could mean for legal teams looking to maximise value in the age of agentic AI.

Shift 1: From tools to workflows

The first wave of legal AI adoption focused largely on individual tasks. Organisations introduced tools designed to assist lawyers with activities such as drafting documents, reviewing contracts, analysing data and summarising information.

Agent-enabled systems move the conversation beyond individual tasks and towards entire workflows.

This creates an opportunity to rethink how legal services are designed and delivered. Instead of asking where AI can be inserted into an existing process, organisations are increasingly asking whether the process itself should be redesigned.

The most valuable workflows are unlikely to be built in isolation. They will need to reflect an organisation's risk appetite, governance requirements and operational priorities, making workflow design a shared exercise between legal teams, business stakeholders and technology specialists.

Organisations will differ in their approach to this. Some legal teams will develop agents in-house, while others will work with external advisers, technology providers or managed service partners to accelerate their access to technology while maintaining control over how it is applied.

The route matters less than the outcome. Agents need to support real legal and business needs, sit within end-to-end workflows and be underpinned by appropriate data, governance and oversight. Without that level of integration, the impact of agents is likely to remain limited.

The starting point should not be "where can we use an agent?" but "which legal outcomes could be delivered better if expertise, process and technology were designed together?" That question forces a more strategic conversation one centered on – maximising real value.

Shift 2: From knowledge ownership to knowledge deployment

At the heart of this transformation is the ability to create systems that can effectively gather, organise and deploy legal knowledge.

Legal teams are rich in knowledge developed through past matters, negotiation strategies, precedent libraries and internal playbooks. Yet much of that knowledge has historically been fragmented or difficult to find. AI changes that, making it possible to surface and apply institutional knowledge systematically and repeatedly with specific nuance.

There is a clear direction of travel: legal value is likely to depend less on where expertise sits, and more on how effectively it can be structured, accessed and deployed. For legal teams, that means thinking about knowledge in two ways: how it supports people today, and how it may need to be organised so that future agents can perform work on behalf of those people in a reliable and governed way.

That should include considering how these systems support the development of future legal talent. As explored in Legal talent 2.0: developing skills for the age of AI, junior lawyers will remain essential, but the experience through which they build judgement may evolve, requiring legal teams to create deliberate opportunities for learning, exposure and progressively more complex responsibility.

This does not mean simply turning an organisation’s internal knowledge into a digital product. In many areas, the most effective agents will need to combine legal expertise with organisation-specific context, including policies, commercial priorities, escalation routes, sector requirements and preferred approaches to risk. The differentiator will therefore be the ability to bring legal knowledge, business context and operational insight together in a secure and practical way.

Shift 3: From expertise to orchestration

One of the most common narratives surrounding AI is that it frees lawyers from routine work so they can focus on higher-value activities.

The more interesting shift may be how legal expertise itself is applied.

In an agent-enabled model, lawyers may become less focused on carrying out every step of a process themselves and more focused on designing the conditions under which legal work is delivered. That means defining standards, setting escalation points, validating outputs, managing risk and deciding where human judgement is required.

Legal expertise therefore becomes more embedded in the architecture of delivery. The lawyer’s role is not diminished or replaced, but it may evolve and become more deliberate: shaping and overseeing how work is performed, not just performing the work itself.

Human judgement will increasingly become concentrated at key decision points: determining objectives, defining acceptable risk, validating outcomes and deciding when human intervention is required.

Shift 4: A changing competitive landscape

The rise of agentic systems could also begin to change the dynamics between in-house teams and external advisers.

Traditionally, much of the value provided by law firms has been delivered on a matter-by-matter basis. In-house legal teams seek specialist advice, external counsel provide expertise and the engagement concludes.

Agent-enabled delivery models introduce the possibility of something more integrated.

If a legal team co-develops an agent-enabled workflow with a particular law firm, value may begin to sit not only in the advice provided, but in the shared delivery model: the workflow, its governance and knowledge layers and the ongoing maintenance of the system.

This does not mean legal panels will disappear. Organisations will continue to value specialist expertise, resilience, flexibility and choice.

However, some relationships may become deeper and more difficult to replicate. That could create a stronger form of institutional connection, particularly where legal processes have been co-designed and refined together. Over time, the most valuable partnerships may be those built not only on legal excellence, but on the ability to effectively co-create and continually refine the systems through which legal support is delivered.

Shift 5: From governance as oversight to governance by design

Governance has often been treated as something that sits around technology. The agentic economy may require a different mindset.

As agentic systems take on more responsibility, building trust into the design process becomes essential. The value of agents lies in their ability to operate with a degree of autonomy, but that same autonomy raises important questions around supervision, accountability and control. For legal services, where accuracy, accountability and insurability matter, governance cannot be added at the end. It has to be designed into the workflow from the start.

Legal teams need confidence that outputs are accurate and appropriately governed. Lawyers need transparency around how those outputs are generated, where human intervention is required and how decisions are validated. Organisations need assurance that data, intellectual property and regulatory obligations remain protected.

Building that trust requires clear governance, robust validation and transparency around how AI is used. That means being clear on how data is used, how outputs are checked, when matters should escalate to a lawyer and where responsibility sits across the workflow. It also requires maintaining appropriate human oversight, particularly where risk or ambiguity is involved.

The most effective implementations will balance autonomy with control, leveraging the efficiency and scalability of agents without compromising on accountability or quality. As agent-enabled legal services mature, trust itself becomes part of the offering.

Shift 6: From efficiency to measurable impact

Perhaps the most significant shift is how legal teams measure value itself.

Much of the conversation around AI has focused on efficiency: reducing effort, accelerating delivery and lowering costs.

As explored in Beyond efficiency: the full value of AI in legal services, while those benefits remain important, they may not represent the greatest drivers of value.

As an increasing proportion of legal work becomes workflow-based, legal teams will benefit from measuring outcomes rather than activity. The question will not simply be whether an agent is faster or cheaper than a human carrying out a particular task. It will be whether the overall workflow improves the quality, speed, consistency and sustainability of legal support.

The biggest opportunities will be in forms of legal service that were previously difficult or impossible to deliver at scale: continuous risk monitoring, portfolio-level insight, automated triage and embedded advisory support designed around specific business needs.

While agent-enabled workflows may also make it easier to quantify outcomes in terms of business value, those outcomes need to be assessed carefully. A workflow that delivers results more quickly may also carry different cost, governance or environmental implications. The biggest challenge will not be measuring activity, but understanding whether the overall impact represents a genuine improvement.

Conclusion

The agentic economy is still emerging, and the technologies that will underpin it are still developing. But the direction of travel is becoming clearer. Legal AI is moving beyond task-based assistance towards more coordinated, workflow-level forms of support – even if there remains significant uncertainty about how quickly, and in what form, that shift will take hold.

For legal teams, the strategic question is not whether to adopt agents, but how to prepare for a world in which legal expertise may need to be captured, structured, governed and deployed in new ways. In many cases this will create opportunities for closer collaboration between legal experts, business teams, technology specialists and external advisers, bringing together different forms of expertise to design, refine and continuously improve how legal services are delivered.

This opportunity is not just to work faster. It is to think differently about how legal value is created. In that sense, the rise of agentic AI is not simply a technology story. It is a design challenge. The organisations that create the most value may be those that become best at bringing these elements together, and continually refining how legal services are delivered as the technology matures and the market continues to evolve.