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Governance as a leadership function
This is where the role of in-house counsel expands again.
AI governance is not a policy document sitting on a shared drive.
It is a living system, one that requires coordination across legal, IT, compliance, HR, and executive leadership.
It requires asking questions that didn’ t exist a few years ago:
■ Where is AI being used across the organization?
■ What data is it trained on?
■ Who is accountable when it makes a mistake?
■ Can its decisions be explained, and defended? These are not purely legal questions. They are business questions with legal consequences.
And increasingly, they are being routed through the legal department.
The skill gap no one is talking about
There is another shift happening, it ' s quieter, but just as important.
The skill set of in-house counsel is changing.
You don’ t need to build AI models. But you do need to understand how they work well enough to spot risk when it appears.
You need to be comfortable asking:
■ What assumptions is this system making?
■ Where could it fail?
■ What happens if we’ re wrong?
And perhaps most importantly, you need to be able to translate those answers into language that executives can act on.
Because the real value of legal insight isn’ t in identifying risk. It’ s in making that risk understandable.
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