CorporateLegal.tech

Remember when legal only saw software purchases at the contract stage? Those days are gone. Every department now wants AI, every AI tool touches data, and every data question lands on legal's desk. In-house counsel has become the de facto gatekeeper for enterprise software, and the job comes with a choice: be the gate everyone waits at, or the gate that makes buying safer and faster.

When EU lawmakers agreed to push back the AI Act's high-risk obligations, a lot of executives read the headline, filed "AI compliance" under 2027, and moved on. That was a mistake. The transparency rules took effect on schedule on August 2, 2026, a watermarking grace period ends in December, and the extra 16 months on high-risk systems is a runway, not a vacation.

A new job title is quietly eating LinkedIn: legal engineer. AI companies are recruiting Big Law lawyers into it, legal ops teams are inventing it from scratch, and nobody fully agrees on the job description. What everyone does agree on is that the department with someone who can translate between lawyers and systems is getting far more out of its tech than the one without.

For the past two years, legal AI has been sold like a gym membership: one flat fee, use it as much as you like. That era is quietly ending. Vendors are experimenting with credits, tokens, and usage tiers, and the industry's own commentators are warning that today's prices are subsidized. If your 2027 budget assumes this year's AI line item stays flat, it's time for a rewrite.

The headline number is spectacular: 87% of general counsel say their teams now use generative AI, double the year before. But ask around your own department and you'll hear a quieter truth. Most of that "adoption" is a few people summarizing PDFs on a Tuesday. This is the year the gap between having AI and getting value from AI becomes a management problem, not a technology one.