Legal AI is moving deeper into legal workflows - is your firm ready?

There has been no shortage of discussion about the potential of AI in the legal sector. Over the past few years, firms have invested considerable time into assessing different models or tools, experimenting with use cases and considering where generative AI might make legal work faster or more efficient. However, as those capabilities continue to develop, the conversation has turned away from considering how well an AI tool can perform a particular assigned task and more towards if the information, systems and processes surrounding it are sufficiently connected and well governed for AI to operate safely and effectively within a firm.

This becomes particularly important as the market begins to look towards more agentic forms of AI, for instance, assistants that can sit within an existing technology environment and participate within the flow of everyday work. In order to retrieve information or understand the context of a matter an assistant is working on, progress a task or interact with several systems, it needs to operate within the environment rather than separately alongside it like some other AI tools (such as LLM’s like ChatGPT). But in doing so, if your data, systems and governance are still not in order, the agentic agent will inevitably encounter the same fragmentation, inconsistencies and boundaries that legal professionals already navigate every day.

This highlights the ongoing challenge the legal sector has around data, compliance and risk management. For law firms, AI readiness is increasingly becoming an information architecture challenge as much as selecting the right technology. Before considering if your firm is ready for agentic AI, it’s worth considering whether your data, permissions/controls and legal workflows are ready for AI to operate within them.

AI is bringing an established challenge into sharper focus

The underlying issue is not a new one; more often than not firms have accumulated increasingly sophisticated technology estates over many years, with practice and matter management systems sitting alongside document management, finance, CRM, compliance tools, email tools and other specialist legal software. Each application may perform its individual function effectively, yet the experience of working across them can still be fragmented, particularly where information needs to be re-entered, reconciled or manually transferred from one stage of a process to another.

Historically, much of this has been discussed through the lens of operational efficiency. Disconnected systems create additional administration, make it harder to establish a consistent view of a matter and can leave valuable information distributed across multiple repositories. AI does not create those problems, but it does make their consequences more significant because an intelligent system is only as useful as the data it can reliably and appropriately access. 

AI governance is becoming information governance

As AI becomes embedded more deeply within legal work, this need for context and control extends beyond operational efficiency into security and governance. The risks associated with AI increasingly depend on how information moves between people, systems and technology, whether permissions remain effective as that information moves, and whether firms retain sufficient oversight of how AI is being used.

Legal IT Insider has been exploring this shift in its ‘Beyond the perimeter – Security and risk in the age of legal AI’ research, highlighting issues including shadow AI, prompt-driven data leakage, privilege erosion, cross-border data exposure and AI-specific incident response. Although these risks manifest in different ways, they share a common thread: firms need to understand where sensitive information is going, who or what can access it and whether appropriate safeguards continue to apply as AI becomes part of everyday workflows. 

Recent regulatory intervention demonstrates why this is becoming increasingly important. In August 2026, the Solicitors Regulation Authority warned firms about the safe and responsible use of AI, having received 42 reports relating to potential AI misuse between July 2025 and July 2026. The issues encountered included confidential client information being entered into AI tools without appropriate safeguards, alongside concerns around inaccurate outputs and supervision. Its accompanying warning notice on the misuse of AI reinforces the need for firms to understand how the AI systems they use store, retain and process information, while ensuring appropriate contractual, technical and organisational safeguards are in place. 

For law firms, this broadens the governance conversation considerably because responsible AI adoption cannot depend on policy alone. If legal professionals turn to unapproved tools because they provide a quicker or easier way to complete a task, risk can emerge through ordinary working behaviour rather than malicious intent. Providing secure, governed AI capabilities within the Legal software and workflows people already use can help reduce that tension, making it easier for firms to maintain permissions, information controls and human oversight without asking employees to choose between productivity and compliance. We covered more about this in our recent webinar Cybersecurity in the legal sector: building resilient, compliant and AI ready law firms hosted by Doug Hargrove, SVP for Legal at OneAdvanced and Simon Riggs, our Chief Information Security Officer.

Creating the right foundations for Legal AI

This brings the conversation back to the foundations beneath the technology. AI models and agentic capabilities will continue to develop rapidly, but the information environment in which they operate has much greater longevity. Connected data, reliable matter information, appropriate permissions, well-designed workflows and effective governance should therefore be considered interconnected parts of an AI strategy rather than separate projects surrounding it.

At OneAdvanced, we see significant potential in bringing intelligence, information and workflow closer together through IQ for Legal, enabling AI to support legal professionals within the software and processes they already use rather than creating another disconnected destination. 

As firms move beyond experimentation towards more meaningful adoption of AI in the legal sector, this shifts the emphasis away from simply identifying which tool offers the most impressive capabilities. The longer-term opportunity lies in creating an environment in which those capabilities can be applied safely, effectively and with the appropriate context.