Control Freaks and Chaos Agents: How GenAI Is Impacting Legal Ops
Striking a balance between Legal Ops discipline and MacGyver lawyer energy.
A notable aspect of GenAI’s arrival into the legal industry was the initial friction it appeared to create with some Legal Ops and Legal Tech leaders.
People who had spent years trying to introduce and optimise legal tech were being positioned as resistant to GenAI because they did not exude sufficient enthusiasm about it. In some cases, experienced operators and mature Legal Ops teams were portrayed as AI skeptics in contrast to a growing tide of enlightened AI believers.
That framing established itself very quickly, especially in the binary discourse zones of places like LinkedIn, where there is often very little room for nuance. Privately, people would message me to express their desire to get into the details of one or more GenAI-related post they had seen, but they were nervous to engage as they didn’t want to risk being mislabeled as anti-AI.
Unsurprisingly, like most things in legal, and in life, the reality was more complex. The majority of Legal Ops teams were not anti-AI. They were anti-repeat-mistakes. They were the cautious buyers from a marketplace full of false promises, red herrings and failed implementations. They were the people best placed and expected to ask “how does that work?” in what was then an environment of black boxes and unanswered questions. The unfortunate reality that many learnt very quickly was that when there’s a party fuelled by hype and excitement, the role of designated driver can easily be skewed into party-pooper.
Yet, as the hype, at least for the first wave of GenAI products, has made way for more realistic conversations and actual deployments, that initial apparent tension has also waned. We are now seeing those sharp lines soften into something more productive, there is increasingly more room for measured opinions, and there is some emerging clarity to how and where Legal Ops best fits in this changing landscape.
Where the Friction Started
To understand the friction, you have to look at where Legal Ops was coming from.
After years of encouraging lawyers to experiment with technology, with mixed but improving results, by the point of the GenAI bang, Legal Ops had started to turn the tide and mature into a function focused on control, structure and enterprise-scale delivery. Their focus was largely on systems and tools that raised the operational bar for the legal team or the enterprise as a whole. Their once lofty and unlikely goals now sitting on top of business cases and firm expectations for delivering ROI.
They knew how hard legal tech was to get right. They had seen CLM projects drag out for years and eDiscovery platforms eat through budgets. They had witnessed tools that promised to revolutionise legal workflows, only to fall flat when lawyers got their hands on them and real-world complexity took over. They’d spent years embedding a ‘People, Process, Tech’ mantra in their organisations, and then spent time repeating it on LinkedIn, panels and podcasts.
So when AI arrived quickly, loudly, and full of promise, often accompanied by a large VC-fuelled marketing engine, Legal Ops teams understandably paused. They asked questions. They sought clarity. In doing so, they were suddenly cast as blockers, the voice of "no," the people who “didn’t get it.” It was a tough label for many Legal Ops professionals who were genuinely excited about the potential, but had a responsibility to be somewhat more measured in their reaction.
Not long ago, they were the ones shouting into the void, chasing budgets for PoCs and pushing leadership to believe in their vision for legal tech.
But the reality was never that simple. Legal Ops wasn’t rejecting AI. It was trying to make sure that if the legal team jumped into this new phase, it did so with eyes wide open and with infrastructure in place to support real outcomes.
The Return of the MacGyver Lawyer
Another interesting feature that has emerged in recent months, as GenAI tools proliferate in enterprises, is the reappearance of the resourceful, self-sufficient, slightly rogue and tech-savvy subject matter expert. I’ll call it the return of the MacGyver lawyer.*
These are the people who understand their legal domain inside out, and also have enough curiosity and capability to pick up new tools and start applying them. With no or little oversight, they are capable of stitching together powerful AI tools (from within Legal or across the enterprise) to build useful solutions or augment their workflows, not in theory, but in live environments. They are not waiting for permission or the perfect conditions. They are creating document generation bots, summarising contracts with custom prompts, and solving real workflow problems with real outputs.
Some people call this “vibe lawyering.” Honestly, it’s not a phrase I love, but I get the idea: lawyers using intuition, experimentation, and new and/or unconventional tech to get things done. It may feel chaotic to functions used to structure, but it is also incredibly valuable. These lawyers are uncovering what is possible well before the formal systems catch up.
As someone who might have been considered a MacGyver lawyer during my time in practice before GenAI, this sparks a bit of pride and nostalgia for me. The areas where I used to push boundaries have since been predominantly absorbed by no-code platforms and document automation tools, often now managed by legal technologists or document engineers who can deliver those results better and faster than I ever could. So it’s both heartening and fascinating to see that with this new wave of GenAI-powered tools, the field has opened up again. Lawyers are seizing these tools and putting them to meaningful use.
* For younger and/or better-cultured readers, MacGyver was a fictional TV character from the 1980s known for solving complex problems using an improbable mix of creativity, technical know-how, and whatever tools he had at hand.
Legal Ops in a Shifting Role
For Legal Ops, all of this creates both tension and opportunity. After years of trying to spark innovation, Legal Ops had partially moved into a phase of containing and sustaining it. They focused on scaling good and established ideas, aligning with enterprise systems, and helping teams avoid being distracted by the latest shiny toys.
But now, Legal Ops needs to flex again. Some of these new tools require play to understand. They demand hands-on experimentation. And the MacGyver lawyers, out in front, are showing what can happen when legal expertise meets technical curiosity.
The job now is not to shut that down. It is to find ways to support it. To give space for that exploration while also building the systems that can scale what works. That means creating environments where innovation and operational rigor can co-exist. Discovery leads to experimentation. Experimentation leads to adoption. Adoption leads to structure.
This also means accepting that not everything will follow a uniform model. Some work will continue to benefit from structure, standardisation and robust enterprise platforms. But other work may benefit from remaining more fluid, driven by empowered lawyers working closely with advanced tools.
The challenge for Legal Ops is to know the difference and act accordingly. Sometimes, a new capability should be codified and scaled. Other times, it might be better left as an efficient, high-trust, high-impact individual workflow.
Where Should Legal Ops Focus Now?
I get asked this question all the time: what should a Legal Ops team’s strategy be for AI?
The only honest answer, and one that lawyers will recognise, is that it depends. It depends on your team, your tools, your culture and your goals. But generally, three key areas are emerging as priorities for most Legal Ops teams over the next few years:
Support the Supercharged SMEs
Legal Ops needs to enable the lawyers who are pioneering with AI. Not by controlling their work, but by helping them make it safer, more shareable and more sustainable. These are real-time, real-ROI experiments.
Legal Ops should look to establish feedback loops that connect individual innovations to team-wide benefit where appropriate. Ensure these lawyers are aware of data sensitivity, confidentiality, and the risks of over-reliance on AI-generated content, but don’t bog them down with concerns that they can navigate on the fly.
Maintain and Optimise the System Layer
Legal Ops must continue to maintain their foundational systems, but also invest in improving them. Many of these tools, especially knowledge management platforms, hold the key to unlocking scalable AI success.
Optimising structure, improving data integrity, and ensuring effective integration across the enterprise is critical groundwork. This work supports both steady progress and future potential, whether a team adopts AI slowly or chooses to move quickly.
Explore and Prepare for the Potential of Agentic AI
Agentic AI, something which we’re going to hear more and more about, has the potential to reshape how legal work is resourced and executed. But I believe that this is not something that will arrive ready to go.
Legal Ops will need to help define how and where to apply it. This includes managing change, building comfort and confidence among users, and supporting constant iteration.
One of the biggest challenges will be surfacing and designing the undocumented workflows that legal teams currently rely on. Much of what AI could eventually automate is not written down anywhere. It lives in people’s heads. It varies by person and by team. Mapping and understanding these invisible processes is an essential first step.
Where We’re Headed
Legal Ops doesn’t appear to be going away. If anything, the role is becoming more important and more diverse.
There is no single strategy that works for everyone. Your approach will depend on your team, your tools, and how ready your organisation is to explore new models. What matters most is recognising that legal operations is no longer one lane. The field is diversifying, and that is a healthy sign of progress.
The smartest Legal Ops teams are not trying to control the whole game. They are staying close to the work, listening to where energy is building, and supporting progress wherever it shows up.
It is not about finding the perfect playbook. It is about knowing how to play while the rules are still being written.