In Part I, Ekumene “E” Lysonge, Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary at NerdWallet Inc., argued that AI is shifting the value of legal leadership from execution towards judgment, governance and decision-making. In Part II, he turns to what comes next: how GCs can redesign their teams – and their own roles – around where human judgment creates the greatest value.
In the first part of this series, I argued that artificial intelligence is changing where value sits inside the legal function.
As drafting, research, contract review, knowledge retrieval, and other execution-oriented work become faster and increasingly automated, the premium on human effort begins to move elsewhere.
Toward judgment.
Toward synthesis.
Toward governance.
Toward trust.
And toward the ability to help organisations make better decisions when certainty does not exist.
That raises a more difficult question for General Counsel:
It is tempting to treat AI primarily as a technology implementation challenge. Buy the right tools. Train the team. Establish acceptable-use policies. Automate workflows.
Those things matter.
But I believe the larger challenge is organisational.
The legal department built for the last decade is unlikely to be the legal department we need for the next one.
The AI-resistant GC must therefore do more than adopt AI.
We must redesign where humans create value.
The first shift may be the hardest.
Legal leaders have to stop organising departments around preserving work that technology can increasingly perform.
That does not mean indiscriminately replacing people with machines. It means being intellectually honest about which activities genuinely require lawyers.
Consider how much legal capacity has traditionally been consumed by first drafts, routine research, document review, contract triage, information retrieval, status reporting, and repetitive compliance work.
AI will not perform all of those activities perfectly.
But perfection is the wrong benchmark.
The better question is whether technology can perform enough of the work, with appropriate human oversight, to allow talented people to spend their time somewhere more valuable.
If the answer is yes, protecting the old workflow does not protect the legal department.
It makes the department increasingly expensive relative to the value it creates.
Our responsibility as leaders is not to preserve legal work.
It is to maximise legal value.
If some work moves toward machines, we need much greater clarity about what should remain human.
I would start with decisions where the answer depends on more than information.
Reading the dynamics between executives.
Understanding how a regulator may perceive an action.
Knowing when a technically defensible position creates unacceptable reputational risk.
Sensing when a negotiation requires pressure and when it requires patience.
Understanding the history behind a board’s risk appetite.
Recognising when the legally correct answer is not necessarily the right business answer.
These situations require context.
They require relationships.
They require empathy.
And ultimately, they require judgment.
The AI-resistant legal department should therefore be designed around a simple question:
That question should influence hiring, development, organisational design, technology investment, and even how legal leaders allocate their own calendars.
For generations, legal careers have been built around accumulating expertise.
Know more law.
Develop deeper specialisation.
Become the person everyone calls when a particular issue appears.
Expertise will continue to matter. But information scarcity has historically amplified its value. AI changes that equation.
When almost anyone can retrieve sophisticated information quickly, knowing something is less differentiating than knowing what matters.
That puts a premium on capabilities that legal departments have historically treated as difficult to teach:
We need to become much more intentional about developing them. The future GC should not simply ask, “Who is my best securities lawyer?” or “Who is my strongest commercial lawyer?”
We should also ask:
Who simplifies complexity?
Who understands the business?
Who earns trust across functions?
Who knows when to escalate?
Who challenges assumptions without stopping momentum?
Who can walk into an executive meeting with incomplete information and help the room reach a better decision?
Those people will become increasingly valuable.
For years, many legal departments operated as destinations.
The business developed an idea.
A contract was negotiated.
A product approached launch.
Then someone called Legal.
That model already struggled with the speed of modern business. AI makes it even less sustainable.
The future legal department needs to operate more like a strategic operating system embedded throughout the company.
That means putting legal judgment upstream.
It means designing governance into workflows rather than layering it on afterward.
It means institutionalising knowledge instead of allowing critical information to live primarily in individual lawyers’ heads.
It means creating visibility so that the right issues reach the right decision-makers at the right time.
And it means using technology to make routine decisions easier while making consequential decisions more visible.
Legal should not aspire to touch every decision.
Legal should help design the system through which the right decisions get made.
That is a very different ambition.
“Our responsibility as leaders is not to preserve legal work. It is to maximise legal value.”
Lawyers are trained to value precision.
That instinct serves organisations well.
But it can also become a liability when precision becomes a prerequisite for action.
AI is accelerating an environment in which business decisions increasingly have to be made before every fact is known, every regulation is settled, or every potential consequence can be modeled.
The answer cannot be recklessness.
But it also cannot be paralysis.
The AI-resistant GC must become comfortable distinguishing between decisions that require near certainty and decisions where 70 or 80 percent confidence, paired with appropriate guardrails, is enough to move.
That requires something I have written about throughout this series: Decision Discipline.
Decision Discipline is not about making perfect decisions.
It is the practice of creating enough clarity around the question, facts, assumptions, ownership, risk, and escalation points to make a sound decision with the information available.
Sometimes leadership means slowing the room down.
Increasingly, it also means knowing when the room has enough information to move.
AI should also force us to reconsider how we measure legal departments.
Volume tells us how much work occurred.
Cycle time tells us how quickly it moved.
Spend tells us what it cost.
Those metrics matter.
But none answers the most important question:
That is harder to measure.
But we can begin looking for evidence.
Did earlier involvement prevent rework?
Did clearer governance accelerate a launch?
Did better escalation prevent an avoidable crisis?
Did technology free lawyers to spend more time on strategic matters?
Did business partners gain greater confidence making decisions without waiting for Legal?
Did the organisation learn from previous decisions?
The legal departments that thrive in the AI era will increasingly measure leverage, not activity.
There is one final implication that may be uncomfortable.
GCs cannot redesign their departments without redesigning themselves.
If most of a GC’s value still comes from being the person with the most legal knowledge, reviewing the most consequential documents, or personally resolving the hardest legal questions, AI should feel threatening.
But if the GC’s value comes from helping the CEO and board understand complexity, aligning risk with strategy, developing leaders, designing governance, protecting trust, and improving enterprise decision-making, AI becomes leverage.
That distinction matters.
The AI-resistant GC is not the lawyer who learns to use the most AI tools.
It is the leader who understands what technology should do, what people should do, and where human judgment must remain accountable.
I am optimistic about the future of the General Counsel role.
Not because AI will leave legal departments untouched.
It won’t.
I am optimistic because AI gives us an opportunity to remove work that has consumed enormous amounts of legal capacity without representing the highest use of legal talent.
What replaces that work is partly our choice.
We can use the capacity to process more contracts, answer more questions, and generate more documents.
Or we can use it to move upstream.
To understand the business more deeply.
To develop better leaders.
To design stronger governance.
To strengthen trust.
And to help organisations make better decisions.
The greatest risk AI presents to General Counsel may not be that technology replaces us.
It may be that technology transforms the work—and we fail to transform the role.
The next generation of GCs should not spend their energy defending the legal department of yesterday.
We should be building the one the future requires.
Author Bio
Ekumene “E” Lysonge is the Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary of NerdWallet, Inc. He advises public-company boards and executive teams on governance, risk, crisis management, strategic transactions, and decision-making. His thought leadership has been featured in ACC Docket, Modern Counsel, GC Elite, Lexology, and other global in-house communities. He writes and speaks about Decision Discipline, clarity, judgment, AI-era leadership, and the evolving role of the modern General Counsel.
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