Tech-Native, Client-Focused: Connecting Technology with Legal Expertise

Across the financial services industry, complexity is accelerating - with regulation, data volumes, and market dynamics evolving faster than traditional legal delivery models can keep pace. In-house teams and their external advisers are under pressure to manage increasing risk and scale, respond faster and deliver greater strategic value.

At the same time, advances in AI and automation are changing how legal tasks are performed. Yet the conversation too often stops at tools. The deeper shift is structural: the emergence of tech-native legal services - where technology is not an accessory but a fundamental component of how legal work is produced.

As Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind argue in The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts, “clients of the future will be inclined to pay for output rather than input, for the value delivered rather than the effort expended”. Put another way, clients' primary concern is the outcome that legal advice achieves - the way the advice is produced, and how long it takes to produce, is secondary (to the extent it's relevant at all). Technology finally allows us to design legal services around outcomes, not inputs.

In simple terms, tech-native legal services are built from the ground up to be delivered through technology. The technology is a critical production mechanism – with lawyers’ expertise applied to supervise, assure quality and exercise judgment.
 
This contrasts with tech-supported services, which apply tools to existing workflows and focus on incremental or iterative improvements.
  
Both are important elements of modern law firm delivery, but tech-native services represent a more radical shift, starting with technology and designing the human roles around it.

Key features of tech-native services include:

• AI and automation at the core, not the edge - document review, drafting or compliance checks executed by software systems that continuously learn.
• Human-in-the-loop assurance - ensuring quality, accountability and legal responsibility remain with qualified professionals.
• Data feedback loops, generating management information (MI) that improves both legal delivery and business decision-making.
• Outcome-based pricing - reflecting efficiency, predictability and value delivered rather than hours recorded.

In short, tech-native legal delivery is not about replacing lawyers; it’s about changing the method of production for legal services.

Client value has traditionally been measured in terms of quality, responsiveness and cost. In a tech-native model, those measures evolve.

• Speed: turnaround times that were once measured in days are now measured in hours - or minutes - without sacrificing accuracy.
• Consistency: embedded logic and playbooks deliver uniform application of policies and standards.
• Insight: MI dashboards track cycle times, volumes and risk trends, enabling proactive management of legal risk.
• Cost predictability: subscription or fixed-fee models align spend with usage and outcomes.
• Auditability: every action taken by the system or human reviewer is logged, simplifying compliance and oversight.

For GCs and Heads of Legal, these changes matter because they unlock value and deliver greater impact. Instead of running to keep up, the focus shifts to advising on strategy and managing risk dynamically.

The real question becomes not “What does the work cost?” but “What value does this service create inside my organisation?”

One misconception about AI-driven delivery is that it sidelines people. In reality, it elevates their role. Lawyers remain accountable for the output - the difference is how they add value.

Human input concentrates around:

• Designing systems - setting legal logic, risk thresholds and data sources.
• Supervising outputs and exceptions – stress-testing analysis, reviewing outliers and complex questions where expert judgment is required.
• Overlaying subject matter expertise – supplementing with specialist knowledge of markets and commercial context.
• Training and improving models - validating data and refining rules.
• Interpreting insights - turning data patterns into strategic guidance for clients.

In short, lawyers move from production to governance. Judgment, ethics and professional responsibility stay central, but the scope of delivery expands dramatically.

Financial services are particularly well-placed to benefit from this shift. Their businesses sit at the intersection of risk management, regulatory compliance and operational efficiency - areas where data and automation already play vital roles.

Tech-native legal solutions are now supporting:

• Automated due diligence and eligibility checks for investment assets, enabling faster decisions and reduced opportunity cost.
• Contract and obligations management, with AI systems tracking key obligations, deadlines and triggers across portfolios and products.
• Regulatory and policy compliance, where automated reviews flag deviations against pre-set criteria.
• Transaction execution, with digital workflows streamlining drafting, negotiation and execution for standardised documents.

Each use case shares a common theme: reducing time to action while improving accuracy and auditability - a combination that speaks directly to the priorities of financial services legal teams.

For law firms, tech-native delivery represents more than operational efficiency - it redefines how firms create, capture and price value.

The traditional pyramid model is built around human capacity. By contract, tech-native models scale digitally. Once a solution is designed and tested, it can be re-deployed across matters with confidence, consistency and low marginal costs.

This shift supports new commercial structures: fixed fees, subscriptions and outcome-linked pricing. It also aligns better with how clients budget for legal services - predictable, transparent and aligned to business objectives.

But the transformation is not purely economic. It’s cultural. Moving from human-centred production to system-centred production requires investment in multidisciplinary teams - lawyers, technologists, data scientists and designers - and a willingness to collaborate differently, both internally and with clients.

With new models come new responsibilities. The legal profession’s obligations - competence, confidentiality and supervision - remain unchanged. The difference lies in how they are exercised.
 
Recent guidance from regulators, including the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s position on AI and the American Bar Association’s Formal Opinion 512, reinforces the principle of accountable adoption: lawyers may use AI tools, but they must supervise their outputs, protect client data, and explain the methods used.

Transparency is key. Clients should expect their advisers to disclose how technology features in their service delivery, and firms should be prepared to demonstrate controls, testing and human oversight.

Tech-native does not mean less responsibility; it means new kinds of responsibility. 

The future of legal services will not be decided by technology alone. It will be shaped by collaboration - between clients who articulate what “value” means to them, and advisers who can build solutions that deliver it.

As Ethan Mollick observes in Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI “through multiple cycles of generation, evaluation, and refinement, [we] can arrive at creative solutions that neither human nor machine could have achieved in isolation.”. In other words, the opportunity is to design a profession where human judgment and machine capability combine to deliver something better than either could achieve alone.

In financial services, where precision and pace are non-negotiable, that combination is already proving its worth.