AI gives the General Counsel two different jobs at once.
Job 1: Use AI in your own team
Legal departments are adopting AI quickly. In The General Counsel Report 2026 by FTI Consulting and Relativity, 87% of general counsel said their teams use generative AI, up from 44% a year earlier. The most common tasks were summarization (83% using or experimenting), identifying contract clauses (63%) and audio and video transcription (53%). This job is about productivity, quality and the shape of the team: which tools, for which work, with which safeguards.
Job 2: Oversee the company's AI
Every other function is adopting AI too, and much of the risk lands on legal's desk:
- Contracts: buying AI from vendors and selling AI to customers.
- Data: confidentiality, privacy and trade secrets in prompts and training data.
- IP: who owns AI output, and the risk of infringement claims.
- Regulation: AI laws, sector rules and regulator guidance.
- Liability: what the company's AI says and decides, and who pays when it goes wrong.
- Claims: what marketing says about the company's AI.
Why the two jobs reinforce each other
A legal team that uses AI daily gives better advice to the business: it knows how the tools fail, what vendor terms look like and what controls are realistic. A legal team that advises the business on AI risk is better at choosing its own tools. Plan both jobs together, with one roadmap.