The role of lawyers in a changing world: In conversation

Discussion with Tim Cummins and Sharon Zachariah:

TC: Contracting is undergoing a structural shift. For decades, contracts were primarily instruments of risk allocation and legal protection — designed to anticipate failure, enforce compliance, and define remedies when things went wrong. Today, market realities are reshaping that purpose. Volatile supply chains, rapid technological change, geopolitical uncertainty, ecosystem delivery models, and outcome-based services all require relationships that evolve over time and at speed, rather than operate against fixed assumptions and lengthy transactional review and approval. At the same time, emerging technology, particularly AI, is transforming what contracts can do, not just what they say, and how decisions can be made. Together, these forces fundamentally change the role of the lawyer and legal practice.

SRZ: So much to unpack there, Tim! Surely, it will be more feasible for a human lawyer to deliver outcome based and flexible contracts for volatile supply chains, rapid technological change, geopolitical uncertainty, ecosystem delivery models, and outcome-based services, because they all require much more nuanced drafting than an AI can deliver. AI is much more suitable for delivering formulaic risk allocation than anything that needs to remain agile, but certainly AI might help with speed (leaving aside the question of accuracy). Therefore, the two trends you are seeing are likely to be two parallel strands of work, in my view, and both of those should be guided by lawyers.

This also brings to mind of a conversation I had recently about junior lawyers. Will AI make them redundant, and if so, who will be the lawyers of the future? I am predicting that only the most talented lawyers who are able to bypass the two years of nannying that a training contract typically promised will be the ones anyone really needs. What do I mean by that? I mean the bulk of menial and repetitive work that is reassuringly simple will indeed be passed to robots and will not be available to trainees. Hopefully, those that get picked for legal jobs will be those with legal skills and commercial acumen rather than interview skills or else, senior lawyers will be called upon to tutor those trainees to bring them up to scratch. Perhaps that will be a more cost-effective solution all round.

TC: It is easy to declare that “the lawyer’s role must evolve.” Much is written about a shift to being a ‘value architect’ and how legal expertise moves upstream, influencing deal design rather than policing outcomes after the fact. It is far harder to explain why lawyers, specifically, would be the ones to assume this expanded responsibility when many of the required capabilities sit outside traditional legal training. The question is therefore not whether lawyers are naturally equipped to design the commercial resilience needed in today’s business environment. In many respects, they are not. The real question is why the role nevertheless may gravitate toward them and under what conditions they can legitimately occupy it.

The role does not pass to lawyers because of capability. It passes because of structural position.

Lawyers occupy a unique institutional position within organizations and transactions. Regardless of whether they are best trained for it, they sit at the point where commitments become binding. Contracts are the formal mechanism through which organizations allocate authority, define accountability, and authorize risk-taking. Almost every significant commercial decision eventually passes through legal review because it is at that moment that intent becomes obligation. This creates three structural advantages:

First, proximity to decision finalization.

Lawyers are present at the moment when commercial assumptions must be translated into enforceable commitments.Procurement, sales, finance, and operations may shape the deal, but legal teams are often the last function capable of halting or reshaping it. That gatekeeping position gives lawyers disproportionate influence over contract architecture, even if they did not originate the commercial design.

Second, cross-functional visibility.

Unlike most specialists, lawyers see across organizational silos. They encounter pricing models, delivery structures, liability exposures, regulatory constraints, governance arrangements, and dispute patterns across many deals and business units. Overtime, this creates a systemic view of organizational risk and failure modes that operational teams, focused on execution, may not possess.

Third, institutional trust and independence.

Boards and executives grant legal functions authority because they are perceived as independent stewards of organizational integrity. When uncertainty increases, organizations instinctively turn toward functions associated with control and accountability.In volatile markets, this pulls lawyers closer to strategic decision-making whether or not they actively seek the role.

In short, the role migrates toward lawyers not because they are inherently the best designers of commercial systems, but because contracts remain the mechanism through which organizations govern commercial reality — and lawyers remain custodians of that mechanism.

SRZ: the three structural advantages you set out so well give lawyers huge advantages – beyond status – that equip them for the space they occupy. It is a tautological process: they are capable of taking decisions because they are asked to and authorised to do so – which gives them practice. The have cross-functional visibility due to their role- so they know how each role fits into the organisation. Because they are trusted, they learn to take responsibility and for the most part strive to be trustworthy.

As a result, those lawyers who reach the level of authority within an organisation to be the effective gate keepers of the parameters of negotiation are most likely well-suited to take on that role. It is important to note that not all lawyers work in-house, and few other non-legal teams have the advantages you have listed above. So while their legal training might not necessarily make them suitable, their on-the-job training is very likely to have done so. Stakeholders from all over an organisation will come to the legal team for counsel so they have an enormous amount of practice in making calls on risk, accountability at its nexus with commercial reality, because that is the job of an in-house lawyer.

TC: But structural position alone is insufficient

Traditional legal education does not emphasize negotiation psychology, stakeholder management, systems design, operational delivery, or financial modelling. Many lawyers are trained to reduce ambiguity, while adaptive contracting requires managing it. Legal incentives often reward risk avoidance rather than performance enablement.

If lawyers attempt to lead commercial resilience using only traditional legal instincts, the result is predictable: over-specification, defensive drafting, slower execution, and risk transfer that ultimately damages outcomes.

Therefore, the future role cannot be understood as lawyers replacing commercial or operational expertise.Instead, it emerges because lawyers are uniquely positioned to integrate enforceability with commercial design — provided they evolve their operating model.

SRZ: I think there is a danger of confusing law school with legal training which takes place on the job like in every other profession and largely depends on the culture of the organisation(s) where they are trained. Lawyers are unlikely to be seeking to replace commercial or operational expertise. However, over time, they may gain both.

In any organisation, the culture of the legal team is dictated by the C-suite or the directors who hire the legal team. If they hire a lawyer or legal team as gatekeepers, it may be because, in their perception, other staff are risk takers and the company requires a balance. If they want to hire a lawyer to be part of a more commercial legal function, they are likely to choose those who are more commercially and operationally minded. Legal roles are as diverse as company cultures, and all the rules of hiring (diversity, cultural fit, complementary skillsets) apply here as well.

TC: Why lawyers can fill the role, if they change how they work

There are three reasons lawyers remain credible candidates for this evolution:

1. Contracts remain legal instruments before they are commercial tools.
Adaptive governance, flexible pricing mechanisms, collaborative escalation models, and AI-enabled execution all ultimately depend on enforceability.Someone must translate business intent into legally coherent structures that survive dispute, regulation, and jurisdictional scrutiny. Lawyers possess the interpretive discipline required to ensure flexibility does not become uncertainty or un enforceability.

2. AI commoditizes traditional legal differentiation.

As drafting, clause comparison, and precedent analysis become automated, the economic value of purely technical legal work declines. This creates strong professional pressure for lawyers to move upstream into advisory and design roles. The profession itself is incentivized to expand into commercial understanding because its historical monopoly over documentation is weakening.

3. Lawyers are trained in structured reasoning under uncertainty.

While not trained in operations or finance, lawyers are trained to analyse incomplete information, anticipatescenarios, balance competing interpretations, and construct frameworks thathold under stress. These cognitive skills, when combined with commercial literacy, are directly relevant to designing adaptive governance models.

The real shift: from owner to partner in design

The most realistic future is not that lawyers become sole designers of commercial resilience, but that they become co-designers within multidisciplinary commercial teams.

In this model:

• Commercial and operational leaders define value and delivery realities.
• Finance shapes economic sustainability.
• Procurement and sales understand market dynamics.
• Contract and commercial managers integrate performance governance.
• Lawyers ensure the resulting structure is coherent, enforceable, and ethically sound.

The lawyer’s comparative advantage becomes translating collaborative intent into durable institutional commitments. But this model has a key dependency – its ability to move at the speed demanded by a fast-moving market environment.

SRZ: In reality, many lawyers are team players who work in precisely the way you have outlined above. Those who don’t are potentially guided by organisational culture. As an example, I have worked in in-house legal teams where they did every bit of work themselves and worked closely with other business teams. I have also worked in in-house legal teams where they have paid external lawyers to do all the work. Why? Indeed, while staff wanted organisational agility to deliver their product or service, leadership wanted to maintain multiple risk control mechanisms in the form of their own legal team as well as external lawyers. Leadership and staff embodied different organisational cultures, with the obvious resulting dysfunctional tension.

TC: A reframing of professional identity

The deeper change is philosophical. Lawyers do not earn this expanded role by default; they earn it by moving from “risk controllers” to “risk translators.” Their legitimacy comes not from legal authority alone, but from demonstrating commercial curiosity, operational understanding, and willingness to share ownership of outcomes.

If they fail to evolve, the role will not remain vacant — it will migrate elsewhere, increasingly toward commercial integrators, contract management professionals, or technology-enabled governance functions.

So the answer is nuanced: lawyers are not naturally the most qualified designers of commercial resilience. But they are structurally positioned at the center of commitment-making. The future role belongs to them only if they broaden their capabilities and embrace collaboration, transforming legal expertise from a constraint on commerce into an enabler of adaptive performance.

SRZ: There is no one kind of lawyer,thank goodness, and not is their skill set uniform. In my view, organisationshave different kinds of lawyers because they choose different kinds of lawyersto suit their own culture. Leadership makes those choices.

There are many lawyers who have and are valued for all the characteristics you outline as desirable, and others who are also in demand, due to their more formalistic approach that is appreciated by their organisations.

Lawyers have authority and status because they are hired to occupy a position of authority and status. Theskillset(s) they have are the ones for which leadership selected them.

The legal profession is not unevolved, but diverse. It is for businesses to choose their direction and thenchoose the right people to get them there.