Jennifer Van Zelst

There is a growing gap between how quickly legal work is evolving and how comfortable firms feel naming that change. ABA’s latest AI Task Force report confirms several trends that legal leaders can no longer afford to ignore.

For generations, the legal profession has drawn a clear line between legal thinking and technical thinking. Lawyers practiced law. IT teams managed systems. Technology was treated as a back-office function rather than a strategic capability. That divide is now disappearing. From the perspective of a legal futurist, the most important shift underway in the profession is this: the lawyer of the future is not just a legal expert - they are a strategic technologist. And firms that fail to make...