GenAI and the Future of Legal Services Procurement

This recent AI prediction stopped me in my tracks:

“Everything that makes a company work today is about harnessing people — and the entire SaaS ecosystem is predicated on monetizing this reality; the entities that will truly leverage AI, however, will not be the ones that replace them, but start without them.”

Talk about a “whoa” ?? moment that really got me thinking.?

It won’t be long before an entirely new ecosystem of GenAI-first legal service providers begin to bloom alongside ALSPs, firms, and GenAI tools.

New startups will be able to launch and scale quickly across the legal-tech stack, thanks to GenAI, and offer an array of services and different pricing models in ways we haven’t even thought of yet.?

For in-house teams, this new ecosystem of outside legal service providers — and the way they engage and work with them — will become impossibly complex. And it raises a key question:

What are you willing to pay for in the age of AI??

Gone are the days of just phoning up your old buddy from law school when the next matter comes across your desk.?

How you select and procure your legal services is now just as important as which providers you pick.

That means that in-house lawyers must not only be experts at providing legal advice to the business, but also experts at how they procure outside legal services for the business.

“But our attorneys have their own way of engaging their preferred law firms and there’s been so much change in the organization recently that we don’t want to impose more change on our lawyers. We’re worried about ‘change-fatigue.’”?

In today’s economy, the biggest threat isn’t the competition, it’s becoming obsolete.

Outside of ignoring the need for a new legal operating model in the first place — the most dangerous position in-house teams can take is ignoring how GenAI will continue to evolve that model — and failing to equip their people to face that change. ?

With GenAI-first legal service providers poised to disrupt the current legal service model, the urgency has never been greater for GCs and CLOs to upskill their teams to:

• Efficiently determine which outside services are needed (if they’re even needed at all)
• How much those services should cost, and
• How effective they are at achieving their intended outcomes.?

“Not this solution, not this change ?, not my team, not now.”?

I hate to break it to you, but change is here. And it doesn’t care that you’re not ready.