Balancing Innovation, Complexity, and Responsibility in Modern Law Firms
- Cosmonauts Team
- May 8
- 4 min read
The legal profession continues to evolve alongside rapid technological advancement, bringing new demands around efficiency, organisation, and resilience.
Andrea Fedi, Partner at Legance, shares his perspective on how innovation is reshaping legal practice, from the rise of AI to the growing importance of internal systems, leadership, and responsibility.
In this Q&A, Andrea reflects on client expectations, legal privilege in a digital environment, and the challenges of balancing innovation with accuracy, accountability, and professional judgement.
Enjoy the interview below.
1. Looking back over the past 10-15 years, what are the most important changes you have seen in how law firms operate and deliver services?
At this point of my career, I can look back up to 30 years ago. What I see is a professional landscape that has been steadily evolving. We have gone all the way from telex to AI systems. And, I must say, lawyers have always accepted the change. The most recent transformative change is of course the rise of AI. However, more generally I see law firms reshaping themselves into complex organisations. This is still an activity which relies on professional skills and sharp minds. Yet, the modern law firm needs a lot of technology, and it is pivotal to have an internal structure to strategise the acquisitions, programme possible switching from one provider to another, defend the clients’ information and ensure the firm is resilient to threats.
2. In your experience, how have client expectations evolved over time, especially in terms of speed, cost, and the use of technology?
Clients go at the same speed as the law firms. Beyond feeding the in-house legal departments with talent and excellent lawyers, they are keen to organise their activities to maximise efficiencies. It is not rare to see that General Counsel are very responsive to new technologies and perfectly understand the opportunities and the risks. We, as private practice lawyers, have much to learn from in-house lawyers, especially on organisation and management.
3. How do you strike a balance between embracing innovation and ensuring that the quality and accuracy of legal advice remain high?
Get the balance right! (I offer lunch to those who recognise the quote) Innovation is problematic and requires new solutions and open legal mindsets. Let me give an example. Take legal privilege. When I started to practise it was easier. Legal privilege covered the communications between the lawyer and the client and the documents which were kept by the lawyer in the office. Now we need to develop a wider doctrine. Documents on the cloud, research carried out by the lawyer using AI, the use of agentic technological proxies should be covered by legal privilege too. The recent case in the US does not seem to fit with that approach, though.
4. Overall, do you think innovation has made legal work more efficient and manageable, or has it introduced new layers of complexity?
Complexity is part of the game. Overall, I feel that AI is undervalued. Most of the tools exploit the generative ability of AI to produce legal summaries or due diligence. Yet, I look forward to predictive AI to sustain anti-corruption internal departments, to spot AML anomalies or to handle the incredibly complicated analysis to comply with international sanctions, embargoes and illicit triangulations. Moreover, what about AI tools to calculate fee quotes and fee caps or to populate the damn timesheets. As I said before, all of those uses should be covered by legal privilege. If I use AI or the cloud to generate a quotation or a timesheet, that cannot be visible to authorities or anyone other than the lawyer and the client.
5. What do you see as the biggest risks or downsides of adopting new technologies in the legal sector?
Besides what I have stated above, the responsibility angle needs to find some solid grounds. If, as a lawyer, I have consulted a reputable AI and I have set a reasonable system of internal controls (which cannot consist of redoing the same exercise of the AI, because otherwise the use of AI is useless) and contractual rules of the game with my provider, what else would the law firm be accountable for? That issue touches upon a very delicate question. What is the responsibility of the law firm, of the provider, of the trainer, of the maintainer, of the software developer? And what if they reside in different jurisdictions? The same questions apply to in-house departments. Once the impact assessments and the organisation are reasonably structured, the business judgment rule should apply.
6. What role does leadership play in driving innovation within a law firm, and how do senior partners encourage others to embrace change?
Leadership is of the essence. The intricacies of legislation require teamwork, which means that senior and young lawyers work together and complement their efforts. AI awareness and literacy should be spread at all levels of the law firm. A senior lawyer should understand and possibly correct or revisit the prompts and inputs of a junior lawyer and understand the potential pitfalls of wrongly querying the AI.
7. If you could change one thing about how leaders in the legal industry approach innovation, what would it be and why?
Well, this is a house secret. I can tell you that we started this exercise more than two years ago and we have been working on it every day.
8. What do you hope the audience will take away from your session at Future Lawyer Europe, Italy?
Work, learn, retry.
Andrea’s insights underline the realities of modern legal practice. Innovation brings opportunity, but also complexity, requiring firms to strengthen structures, clarify responsibility, and adapt long-standing legal principles to new technologies.
Andrea will be joining Future Lawyer Europe - Italy 2.0 Day 1 for a keynote session, where he will contribute to the conversation on how the legal profession continues to evolve in a technology-driven environment.
Register now to join the discussion at Future Lawyer Europe - Italy 2.0.
