Why Legal Data Will Define the Future of AI in Law

AI adoption across the legal sector is accelerating, but technology alone is not enough to deliver meaningful transformation. The quality of the data, workflows, and governance behind these systems will ultimately determine their value.

In this Q&A, Libra shares perspectives on why structured legal content is becoming the foundation of trusted AI, how legal teams can scale without adding complexity, and what skills will define the next generation of legal professionals.

The discussion also explores legal data governance, organisational culture, and why the future of legal innovation depends as much on human judgement as it does on technology.

Enjoy the interview below.

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1. The future of legal work is increasingly shaped by AI, data, and automation. What role do you believe technology should play in empowering, rather than replacing, legal professionals?

AI does not make legal judgement obsolete; it makes it more precise and more scalable. The real shift is from AI as a productivity tool to AI as a distribution mechanism for legal expertise. That is exactly what we are building at Libra: a platform where lawyers’ knowledge reaches further and faster, with less friction. And it works because we started from the right premise: legal AI is only as good as the content feeding it. Authoritative, structured, jurisdiction-specific legal data is not a nice-to-have, it is the foundation. Without it, you get acceleration towards the wrong answer; with it, you get a tool that lawyers can actually trust and build on.

2. “The Next Generation of In-House Talent” is a key topic this year. What capabilities will define the most successful legal professionals of the future?

Subject matter expertise remains the foundation, but the most valuable legal professionals of the next decade will also know how to design processes, evaluate AI outputs critically, and understand where human judgement is non-negotiable. At Libra, we operate across 10 jurisdictions, serving tens of thousands of users. That experience tells us that the lawyers who get the most value from AI tools are those who know their own workflows well enough to reshape them. Adaptability is a skill; it needs to be developed deliberately.

3. As organisations face growing pressure to “do more with less”, how can AI help legal teams become more scalable and efficient without increasing complexity?

“Do more with less” is often answered with a list of tools; that is the wrong response. The real answer is a reliable data architecture underpinning those tools. Legal teams that scale effectively are not adding complexity; they are reducing it by grounding AI in high-quality, structured legal content. The legal content within Libra is curated by publishers such as Wolters Kluwer, which have been operating in the market for more than thirty years. That institutional depth is what separates tools that genuinely scale legal work from tools that generate plausible-sounding output. The difference matters enormously in a regulated environment.

4. There is a growing conversation around designing innovation-friendly cultures within legal organisations. What does that culture look like in practice?

It is not about hackathons or innovation labs. They are valuable, but clearly not enough. It is about whether a lawyer in that organisation can raise their hand, say, “this process does not work”, and have that concern received positively. In practice, it means leadership participating visibly in the learning curve, not just in the announcements. It means measuring experimentation, not just outcomes. What we see consistently across markets is that adoption accelerates where there is a senior sponsor who is genuinely curious, not just supportive on paper.

5. Many legal teams are still navigating uncertainty around AI adoption. What practical first steps would you recommend for organisations beginning their AI journey?

The most common mistake is starting with the tool. Start with a workflow that is painful, repetitive, and well defined, then ask whether AI can meaningfully improve it. The second step is data quality: what content is the AI working with, and can you trust it? This is where many pilots quietly fail. At Libra, our starting point is always the content layer and users’ needs, because a model is only as reliable as the information it is reasoning over. Once you have those two things right, you can build on a solid foundation to help lawyers solve real problems.

6. Cybersecurity, data governance, and AI are increasingly interconnected. How should legal leaders prepare for this convergence over the next few years?

Legal leaders need to understand that AI systems are only as trustworthy as the data governance frameworks surrounding them. Cybersecurity, AI governance, and data protection are converging into a single risk surface. The EU AI Act, GDPR enforcement, and national implementations such as Italy’s Law 132/2025 are already creating concrete obligations. Legal teams that treat this convergence as a risk to manage reactively will be perpetually behind. Those that treat it as a competency to build will be the ones advising the business credibly on AI decisions, rather than simply responding to incidents.

7. If we were having this conversation again in 2030, what do you think would surprise us most about how legal work has evolved?

In 2030, we will be surprised by how measurable legal knowledge has become. Right now, most institutional legal knowledge is locked in people’s heads and in document repositories that no one has structured intelligently. By 2030, the organisations that have curated and structured that knowledge will have a compounding advantage. The platforms with the deepest insight into how legal professionals actually consume, apply, and challenge content will shape how the next generation is trained, how risk is assessed, and what legal advice looks like. That is not a prediction about AI models; it is a prediction about data. Whoever controls the best legal data layer will define the market. That is the race already underway.

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Libra’s insights highlight an important reality for the legal sector: successful AI adoption is not simply about deploying new tools, but about building trusted data foundations, improving workflows, and enabling lawyers to apply their expertise more effectively at scale.

As Platinum Sponsor of Future Lawyer Europe Italy 2.0, Libra will have an exhibition booth across both days of the event.

Tommaso Ricci, Country Manager of Legal Engineering (Italy) at Libra, will also lead the standalone session “(Legal) Data is the New Oil” on Day 1 and join the Day 2 panel, “The Future Business Partner: Redefining In-House Legal in the Age of AI”.

Register now to join the discussion at Future Lawyer Europe - Italy 2.0.