A recent moment in Silicon Valley — an investor pitch delivered casually at a bar over an iPad — captured a broader shift: modern business no longer depends on boardrooms, desktops or rigid formality. The same lesson is coming for law. The next generation of legal practice will live inside data stacks, rapid iteration cycles and AI-native workflows, not paper files and billable-hour economics.
Although “AI-native” has become a buzzword across tech, most law firms still treat AI as an add-on to old systems. A genuinely AI-native legal business would begin from a blank page: identify a single, repeatable client problem, build a platform to solve it every time, and treat every matter as new training data. Routine legal tasks — drafting, research, pricing, pattern recognition — will increasingly be handled by models, while advisory work becomes a feature within an intelligent, continuously learning system rather than the product itself.
Christensen’s innovator’s dilemma now applies to law. Incumbent firms struggle to reinvent themselves because their business model depends on utilisation, hours and partner profit. As a result, AI is often deployed only to make existing processes faster. But disruption typically starts in lower-stakes, repeatable workflows — entity management, compliance monitoring, contracts — where AI-native entrants can build focused products unconstrained by legacy systems or partnership structures. Over time, these digital businesses scale through compounding intelligence: models, data and productised know-how improving with each matter.
For established firms, the strategic choice is stark: augment the old model or build a parallel digital business with its own P&L, metrics and mandate to innovate — even if that means cannibalising traditional work. Incremental uplift will make today’s practice more efficient, but only a separate AI-native business can grow into something more valuable than the partnership itself.
Lessons from the tech sector translate directly into law: shorten feedback loops, treat legal services as products with roadmaps, treat data as the core asset and agree early on risk appetite and human oversight. This approach elevates human judgment rather than replacing it. The most valuable lawyers will be those who can co-create with the model — iterating prototypes with clients, converting intuition into system guardrails, interrogating live data and overriding the model when instinct demands it.
Soon, AI capability will be commoditised. What will differentiate firms is leadership — their willingness to build a new digital business alongside the incumbent one, protect it from legacy KPIs and embrace the cultural shift required to make AI-native practice real. Law now stands at its own inflection point: firms that treat AI as a strategic pivot will define the future of trusted advisory work; those that do not will be left maintaining the past while others reinvent the profession.
Source: ITbrief New Zealand
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