Industry leaders explore how people, process, and AI are reshaping the way legal work gets done; Wolters Kluwer 2026 Future Ready Lawyer Survey captures a profession in motion

Richards was joined by a prominent group of panelists, including Philipp Mueller, SVP of Product Management, Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory; Maria Dymitruk, Head of AI Law Department at Lubasz & Partners law firm); Justin Wales, head of Legal for The Americas @ Crypto.com; Rajiv Arora, VP, technology product management, Wolters Kluwer, Legal & Regulatory US; and Benedikt Quarch, co-director of the German Legal Tech Hub.

While routine legal tasks are being displaced, the legal industry remains vibrant. Richards led off the questioning by asking panelists what they believed is the biggest shift in the structure of legal work when AI becomes part of the legal workflow. In response, Justin Wales indicated that he’s seeing work like initial drafts and initial research “being displaced very, very quickly.” He believes that trend will continue, a sentiment shared by a majority of the other panel members. But Wales is optimistic about the future of the legal industry and even sees billing rates rising for those lawyers on the communicative side of legal work. “When you’re working in commercial deals, when you’re working in regulated environments, when you’re working in litigation, very little of the job is just sitting down and doing the research and drafting. There’s a people element to it,” Wales observed.

Moreover, Wales is not concerned that the expanding role of AI in legal practice will eliminate the need for lawyers, a sentiment sometimes expressed in popular culture. The value a lawyer brings to a matter is often knowing the judge, knowing the regulator, knowing the person on the other side — and that’s going to be hard to replace with a computer, Wales said.

Evaluating and owning the outcome is essential in an AI age. AI has upended the document drafting evaluation process, according to Maria Dymitruk. Not very long ago, young lawyers would draft a document, a more senior attorney would provide feedback, and eventually a final product would emerge. But now this process might be compressed into a matter of seconds, Dymitruk observed. As a result, the primary task of a lawyer — even a very young lawyer — is to evaluate output, which Dymitruk states is the most difficult part of the legal job, requiring significant cognitive effort and emotional grit, which, for the most part, was previously reserved for lawyers with five to 10 years of experience. She also acknowledges the psychological toll and physical exhaustion that can result from a legal practice that centers around intense evaluation, which she admits it might not be for everyone. Still, in an AI age, Dymitruk underscored the primacy of a lawyer being the human in the loop, evaluating the outcome, and, at the end of the day, taking responsibility for that outcome.

Unbundling tasks and more informed clients. Along with generating first drafts, and automating research tasks, another key shift driving the evolution of AI tooling and technologies is what Wolter Kluwer’s Philipp Mueller describes as “the unbundling of tasks.” This involves unpacking different workflows into different subtasks, having machines do some of that work, or at least first drafts of some of that work, and then ensuring that legal professionals spend their time more wisely, including driving more impactful client engagement, according to Mueller. He noted this is what he sees playing out through product lines as well.

Mueller also shared another fascinating observation that is causing headaches for many law firms in the AI era. With the widespread availability of AI tools, clients often show up to their lawyer’s doorstep much more informed. However, “not necessarily better informed, and often wrong,” he said. As a result, Mueller wonders when fact checks and the sanity checks might show up, and what role regulation might play in that journey.

A shrinking knowledge gap and the in-house team. Before the AI revolution, there was a knowledge gap in the legal world, according to Quarch. He noted: “The lawyers always knew more about the law than the consumers ever would and ever would be able to know about the law.” Quarch added, “this knowledge gap is decreasing, not eliminated completely, but it’s definitely getting smaller.”

Along with Wales, Quarch believes this major shift is bringing the legal profession more in the direction of people work. “It’s about negotiating, strategizing, knowing the other side, knowing the judge. And it’s not so much anymore about the real knowledge,” he remarked.

Quarch also had a recommendation for legal service providers and law firms looking to thrive in the AI age — be more inside the system of the in-house teams. Quarch stated this is a strategy that the European-based Wolters Kluwer Libra unit has already adopted. When law firms really connect to the central working place of the in-house teams, operations will be much smoother, fewer emails will fill up inboxes, and more work will be kept in-house, Quarch said. At the same time, law firms will have plenty of work to do, just in a different and more convenient setup for everybody.

Differing views on how to best train the legal pipeline. According to Wolter Kluwer’s Rajiv Arora, one of the biggest AI-motivated shifts seen in the legal world is document-centric work moving to data insight driven work as AI is embedded into workflows. Moreover, the role of a lawyer is changing from providing reactive support towards becoming proactive partners in decision making.

This perspective informed Arora’s controversial answer to Richards’ final question of the webinar: How will AI impact incoming pipeline and development opportunities for junior lawyers? Arora observed that with AI, experience that took two years for a junior attorney to accumulate might be accomplished in six months.

Arora explained that with the help of synthetic data, which machines will be able to generate with the help of knowledgeable experienced attorneys, what a novice attorney previously learned on the job might be part of college studies or a law school curriculum. In short, a law school graduate might already know the basics of what it previously took a junior attorney two years to learn. Justin Wales had a different view. As a practicing attorney, he said he does not believe there is a way to effectively curate all the best information and short-circuit the traditional attorney learning process, which he described as a “struggle of not being good at your job, and then learning through people who have gone through the same sort of trials.”

Given that the webinar ended with disagreement between panelists, it is a testament that there are no easy or universally agreed upon answers in an AI age. And as we head towards a rapidly evolving AI-infused future, perhaps there is merit in both Arora’s and Wales’ positions.

A word about methodology. The survey, which provides current and in-depth perspective on law firms and corporate legal departments, reflects insights from legal professionals across the U.S., China, and nine European countries — Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Poland and Hungary.

You can access a recording of the Competing for Trust in an AI-Driven World webinar by clicking here, as well as the 2026 Wolters Kluwer Future Ready Lawyer Survey — Building Confidence in an AI era by clicking here.