Legal Departments Move From Testing AI to Governing It

For decades, the legal department was one of the last enterprise functions to adopt new technology at scale. The work was too nuanced, the stakes too high, and the profession too cautious. Generative AI changed the pace of experimentation. Agentic AI is changing the pace of deployment, and this week the Prompt Economy turns its attention to what that shift looks like inside corporate legal.

AI agents are now reviewing contracts, monitoring regulatory changes and handling first-pass discovery in production environments at major law firms and corporate legal departments. The question for general counsel is no longer whether to deploy. It is how to govern what is already running.

For example, a Law.com article written by Reece Clark, a shareholder in Polsinelli’s technology transactions practice, argues that agentic AI has fundamentally shifted what general counsel are accountable for. In 2025, GCs evaluated AI tools for risk and return. In 2026, they are managing systems capable of making independent decisions without continuous human intervention.

The article says Microsoft’s Legal Agent, which analyzes documents, drafts edits, and reviews contracts, is representative of the tools now landing on GC desks. The autonomy is useful. It also creates new exposure: legal noncompliance, third-party harms, and decisions made faster than any oversight loop can catch them.

The article argues GCs are responding through the contract itself. AI addenda in vendor agreements have become the primary tool for protecting organizations from AI vendor overreach, covering acts and omissions, violations of law, and liability questions that arise when an autonomous system makes a consequential mistake. Contracting for those protections, the article argues, is now a core GC competency.

Harvey Builds the Agent Layer for Law Firms

A Bloomberg article covering Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg’s appearance on Bloomberg Tech reports that Harvey unveiled a tool allowing law firms to build custom AI agents tailored to their specific practice areas. Weinberg told Bloomberg the company is betting it can win the legal market by staying in its own lane, building domain expertise in legal workflows rather than expanding into adjacent professional services.

Harvey now serves more than 700 customers across 58 countries and has been adopted by 70% of AmLaw 10 firms and nearly 50% of AmLaw 100 firms. The article says Harvey’s platform covers contract analysis, due diligence, compliance monitoring and litigation support, with models trained on legal materials at a depth that general-purpose models cannot replicate. The firm raised $200 million at an $11 billion valuation in March 2026, with funds directed toward expanding its AI agents and growing legal engineering teams embedded with customers.

General Counsel Are Now Leading the Technology Agenda

A report from FTI Consulting and Relativity, based on interviews with 30 general counsel and a survey of 224 chief legal officers, found that generative AI adoption in corporate legal departments has nearly doubled year over year, with 87% now reporting use within their teams compared with 44% in 2025. Legal departments with a formalized technology roadmap reached an all-time high of 53%, more than double from 25% the prior year.

The most common use cases are summarization at 83%, contract clause identification at 63%, e-discovery and document review, contract drafting and first-pass review. “Generative AI has become a fixture in the majority of legal departments,” said Sophie Ross, Global CEO of FTI Technology. David Horrigan, Discovery Counsel at Relativity, told the report that GC use of generative AI has risen from 20% in 2023 to 87% today, marking the end of what he called the era of the Luddite Lawyer.

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