Earlier this month, Caitlan Rocha, Ivo’s In-House Counsel, led a roundtable of general counsel at The L Suite’s 2026 Legal AI Conference. A few years ago, the conversation around AI in legal centered on one question: Will it replace lawyers? Today, that debate has largely disappeared.
Instead, legal leaders from industries like financial services, healthcare, tech, and media spent the session discussing something much more immediate: how to leverage AI to keep pace with an ever-growing volume of legal work while protecting their organizations.
The workload that won’t stop increasing
The conversation Caitlan led centered on how fast the work is piling up, and how thin legal teams are stretched trying to keep pace. Several leaders described feeling buried under the sheer volume of work.
It's not hard to understand why. Like we often say at Ivo, everything starts with an agreement. You can't hire an employee, purchase software, engage a vendor, or sell a product without a contract. And as companies grow, so does the number of counterparties they manage.
Ironically, many of the technologies companies adopt to become more efficient generate even more contracts to review. Every new software category brings new vendors. Every vendor relationship comes with its own MSA, NDA, security review, data processing agreement, and procurement process.
Legal teams are left trying to solve an impossible equation: workloads continue to grow while resources largely don't. At the same time, every function around them increasingly assumes AI has already solved the problem.
“Just use AI,” right?
At this point, most legal leaders have moved beyond asking whether AI can help. They know it can. Many organizations have even mandated AI adoption to improve productivity across the business.
But for legal and compliance leaders, the challenge isn't whether to use AI; it's how to do so responsibly.
“A number of them told me they felt like they were building the plane while flying it,” Caitlan says.
“We all follow the few relatively clear boundaries that have emerged: don't cite a case that doesn't exist, don't upload privileged documents to a public chatbot.” Beyond that, there are few established standards, and no clear timeline for when a comprehensive governance framework will emerge.
While AI regulation continues to evolve, there is still no comprehensive governance framework that answers many of the practical questions legal teams face every day, including how contract data should move through AI systems, what governance looks like in practice, or what "good" AI adoption actually looks like.
For companies in regulated industries, that uncertainty shapes every evaluation. Legal teams aren't just deciding whether a tool is valuable. They're documenting why its use is appropriate, how risks are mitigated, and how those decisions can be defended as regulatory expectations continue to evolve.
Because there are so few governance frameworks in place, companies have established their own AI governance policies, but many were written out of an abundance of caution and are too rigid to reflect the actual work employees need to do—a direct clash with employer AI mandates.
As a result, employees, including lawyers, are working around those policies already simply to keep up with the workloads they're expected to manage. Many companies are now rewriting their AI policies because the first draft didn’t reflect how people needed to work.
We’re all figuring it out together
If there was one reassuring takeaway from the discussion, it was that no one is navigating these challenges alone. Every company is grappling with the same AI growing pains: balancing innovation with security, and productivity with governance.
Staying at the forefront of technology while trying to stay compliant and secure is incredibly difficult.
“Nobody in the room claimed to have the answer,” Caitlan says. “What they had in common was the recognition that they're adopting AI to deal with the increased workload, but they’re doing so without the familiar guardrails, decades of precedent, or fully developed governance frameworks to demonstrate they’re doing it correctly.”
That may be the biggest shift of all.
The conversation is no longer about whether AI will replace lawyers. It's about how lawyers can thoughtfully adopt AI to better support their businesses while building governance that will stand the test of time.
There isn't a tidy ending yet. The technology is evolving faster than the rules, and every legal department is learning in real time. But if the roundtable made one thing clear, it's that legal leaders aren't trying to solve these questions in isolation. They're sharing experiences, comparing approaches, and learning from one another because, for now, that's how the profession moves forward.
