Have Your Say: Has Being An In-house Lawyer Changed?

By Richard Mabey, CEO, Juro.

For every survey completed below, Juro is donating to LawCare, the mental health charity for the legal profession.

First, the pandemic forced five years of technology adoption in three months while we all worked from lockdown. Then, an inflationary downturn changed the investment and budgetary environment dramatically

Then generative AI went from a niche interest to a business tool so mainstream that it drove Nvidia’s market cap to $3.4 trillion. And perhaps no professional sector has seen more noise (and signal) than legal, when it comes to AI taking on tasks traditionally tackled by human beings.

AI sweeping through the business and practice of law is being hailed as a seismic shift by technology vendors (including us), but is that how you’re actually experiencing it day to day?

Beyond AI, what’s the state of the nation in in-house legal when it comes to things like mental health and wellbeing, ways of working, salaries, the regulatory environment and technology adoption?

We are inviting in-house lawyers to fill in our annual community survey [HERE]. It’s anonymous and confidential. And this year, we’re excited to share that we’re donating to LawCare, the mental health charity for the legal profession, for every submission from an in-house lawyer.

[CLICK HERE TO FILL IN THE CONFIDENTIAL SURVEY]

We’ll share the results here when we close the survey.

For what it’s worth, the legal teams we work with at Juro are embracing change in their teams and their roles.

It was perfectly rational a few years back to start out with an understanding of ‘how things have always been done’, and, dare I say it, to hoard tasks to make the case for more headcount sooner rather than later.

Things have changed. Here’s the new way:

1. Think from first principles about the legal tasks in your company

Legal tasks were happening, somehow, the week before you joined – they can run that way for an extra week or two while you take the time to dig into their root causes. Go slow at first so you can go faster – much faster – later. Front-loading your understanding of the organisational risk appetite fits here.

2. Look for opportunities to put legal tools safely in the hands of non-lawyers

Why make a painstaking case to bring one person into legal when you could invite the whole company into the team instead? Business colleagues don’t want to be blocked by legal anymore than you want to block them.

Why make a painstaking case to bring one person into legal when you could invite the whole company into the team instead?

If you can find ways safely to let them self-serve, you can stop a whole swathe of lower-risk work from hitting your desk in the first place. AI is making this easier by the day. A technology strategy is more viable and faster to implement than a hiring strategy in 2025.

3. … but model a healthy scepticism about accuracy and compliance

You might be able to get dozens of colleagues cosplaying as paralegals and contract administrators, self-serving on their commercial agreements and negotiations. But what they can’t do is instinctively subject new AI tools and processes to the ‘sniff test’ of an experienced lawyer.

Everyone from the most junior salesperson to the CTO is going to be looking to legal to be the grown-up in the room when it comes to privacy and compliance. Get a grip on the risks and opportunities presented by your company’s AI footprint. Set the tone early.

4. Actively experiment with models and tools

We’re running a survey at the moment and overwhelmingly it looks like the CEOs and CFOs that GCs report to want them to use AI more than they do right now. So make sure you’re informed – what’s Claude best at vs ChatGPT? What are the issues with DeepSeek? Does Perplexity hallucinate?

You can bet that the GCs actually breaking ground here and forging ahead are all over the latest developments. The difference is that they are ‘doing’ while others are just talking and researching. Follow their lead and default to action.

5. Don’t go it alone

The swerve from an environment with tonnes of lawyers in a law firm to one or two in a mid-market company can be dramatic to experience. Even GCs in their 4th or 5th role can find themselves feeling isolated when it comes to a particular head-scratching problem only a lawyer should tackle.

Thankfully, nowadays there are lots of communities for like-minded in-house lawyers to get together and leverage their collective wisdom. I’ll mention our own – join us at juro.com/community – but our friends at Crafty Counsel do an excellent job, as well as US equivalents like the L Suite.

Fundamentally it’s a really exciting time to be starting a new in-house role. AI is reimagining legal in real time, and there’s nowhere you can drive that change faster than in a senior in-house role at a forward-thinking company.

Fill in Juro’s annual survey of in-house lawyers here. Responses are anonymised upon receipt. Juro is donating to LawCare for every submission from an in-house lawyer. Find out more about LawCare here.

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[ This is a sponsored article / survey by Juro, with Artificial Lawyer. ]