Source: Financial Times
Corporate legal departments aren’t just experimenting with AI anymore they’re actively using it to bring work back in-house that previously went to external counsel.
According to the Financial Times’ latest report on innovative in-house legal teams, early adopters are moving beyond incremental improvements and starting to reshape the boundaries between what gets handled internally versus what gets sent to law firms.
From Assistants to Agents
Sabastian Niles, chief legal officer at Salesforce, puts it plainly: his team is working to “define and shape what it means to have human and agentic AI teams working together.”
The distinction matters. Salesforce isn’t just using AI to help lawyers work faster they’re deploying AI agents that can make decisions, take action, and complete multi-step tasks with minimal human involvement.
The team has built AI agents for compliance tasks, allowing them to automate and run more checks and reviews at speed. Another tool handles routine queries from the sales team without involving a lawyer at all.
The Work That’s Coming Back In-House
John Zecca, chief legal officer at Nasdaq, sees AI fundamentally changing the balance between in-house and external counsel work. Just as employment, tax, and IP expertise were brought in-house from law firms in the past, he predicts AI will facilitate another wave of work shifting to corporate legal teams.
“You might see more discovery done in-house, while outside counsel are more focused on the litigation,” Zecca suggests. “More due diligence might be done in-house, and outside counsel are there for advice on the deal documents.”
At CrowdStrike, chief legal officer Cathleen Anderson notes her team is now better prepared in discussions with external counsel “because it’s very easy to do a quick early case assessment” using AI tools.
Her team of 80-plus was invited by the company to champion AI adoption across the entire business. All legal team members were trained in generative AI, and more than 100 AI agents for legal use are now at various stages of development.
The New Skills Required
Amid concerns that AI will eliminate jobs, chief legal officers argue the technology demands new capabilities rather than fewer people.
“Once a tool has been developed, lawyers need to work more like a product manager,” Anderson explains, “because development is just the first of many stages.”
One emerging priority is data management collecting and organising legal information from contracts, guides, legal briefs, and billing software to fuel AI systems effectively.
What This Means for Law Firms
The implications are clear: the traditional division of labour between in-house teams and external counsel is shifting. Work that was previously too time-intensive or specialised for corporate legal departments discovery, due diligence, early case assessment is increasingly feasible to handle internally.
Law firms aren’t disappearing from the picture. But their role is evolving from doing the work to advising on the work, from handling first-stage tasks to focusing on strategic counsel.
For in-house teams, the message is equally clear: AI isn’t just about efficiency gains. It’s about capability expansion taking on work you couldn’t previously justify handling internally and proving you can do it faster and cheaper than external counsel.
The question isn’t whether this shift will happen. It’s whether your legal team is building the infrastructure to make it happen.
Read more: Financial Times
