If your legal department bought an AI tool, trained a few people, and reported a 15% efficiency gain, are you ready for the future of legal work?
AI-native legal departments understand that the opportunity goes beyond completing familiar tasks faster. It is about rethinking how legal work gets done.
On Notes to My Legal Self, Adam Becker, Director of Legal Operations at Cockroach Labs, explained why adopting AI requires more than new technology. Legal operations has evolved from improving efficiency and managing budgets to helping legal departments rethink how they work. For in-house counsel and legal leaders, the challenge is not simply bringing in new tools, but making them part of everyday legal practice.
Watch the full conversation with Adam Becker here:
AI-Native Legal Departments Go Beyond Efficiency
A department can purchase an AI platform and point to faster contract reviews. But a more meaningful approach starts with the outcome a lawyer needs, then asks how technology can help achieve it.
Instead of using AI only to compare a contract against a playbook, a lawyer might use it to examine past customer agreements, identify patterns, and prepare a more informed negotiation strategy. This moves AI beyond individual tasks and changes how legal work gets done.
Legal Technology Still Depends on People
Becker emphasizes that successful AI-native legal departments must understand how colleagues actually work. Telling a lawyer that an AI tool will make them ten times faster can sound like criticism, suggesting they were not efficient before. A better starting point is curiosity. Ask what makes a task difficult, why a particular clause matters to the business, and what context shapes the lawyer’s judgment.
Test a tool, bring back a possible solution, and invite the lawyer to challenge it. That process builds trust because people help shape the change instead of being told to accept it. AI may need context and adjustments before it produces useful work. The goal is not to replace professional judgment, but to make that judgment easier to apply and share.
Break Down Silos and Share What Works
Becker warns that one group may discover an effective way to use AI while another refuses to engage or never hears about the learning. That is a missed opportunity for AI-native legal departments.
When teams share prompts, workflows, examples, and lessons from failed experiments, useful practices can spread across teams. Knowledge management matters again, not only to organize templates and documents, but also to make collective learning available. Legal teams that encourage collaboration can get more value from the technology they already have.
AI-Native Legal Departments: Start With One Frustrating Task
Becker’s advice is practical: find something people dislike doing, something repetitive or frustrating, and see whether AI can simplify it or eliminate unnecessary steps.
Start with tools the organization already provides. Experiment, learn what works, and stay mindful of privacy, privilege, and security requirements. Show colleagues what you discovered and invite their feedback. A small improvement can reveal broader possibilities.
For legal leaders, progress should not be measured by whether the department can say it uses AI. It should be measured by whether people are working in smarter, more connected ways—and whether technology helps the team serve the business better. Ultimately, AI-native legal departments will depend as much on empathy, curiosity, and shared learning as on the tools themselves.
Watch the full conversation here: Notes to My (Legal) Self: Season 15, Episode 6 (ft. Adam Becker)
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