Clients now come with a problem to solve rather than a role to fill. That shift is changing what secondments are used for, and it may change how General Counsel plan their teams.
Over the last few years, almost every conversation about the future of legal teams seems to find its way to AI.
I have spent the last several years building Counselect’s legal secondments practice, so I speak regularly with General Counsel, Heads of Legal and other legal professionals. I hear a mix of excitement, curiosity and uncertainty. Organisations are exploring AI tools, looking at how contracting and other legal processes can be automated, and thinking about what technology adoption will mean for their teams. Individual lawyers, understandably, are asking more personal questions: What does this mean for my role? Will it become redundant?
From what we are seeing, I do not think the immediate story is about AI replacing legal teams. It is about AI changing the kind of talent legal teams need, and how they access it. An AI project needs particular expertise for a particular stretch of time, and that is changing how teams think about hiring.
From headcount to capability
One change I have noticed is in the brief itself. Clients increasingly come to us with a particular problem to solve. It may be a contracting backlog, a technology implementation, a privacy or compliance project, or a process that needs improving. Or it may be a legal team that knows it needs to transform but lacks the bandwidth to do so while managing business-as-usual (BAU) work.
So instead of asking “What PQE are you looking to hire?” we start with three questions. What outcome is the team trying to achieve? What capability does it need? And for how long?
The answers vary. An AI implementation may create a temporary need for privacy, governance or regulatory expertise. A contract automation project may require someone who understands both contracts and processes. A wider transformation may require a legal operations professional. And sometimes the answer is much simpler: the existing team has exactly the right people to lead the transformation, but they don’t have the time.
Secondments: more than cover
Legal teams are being asked to do more. They must support growing businesses, manage increasing regulatory complexity and control external legal spend, while also exploring how technology and AI can make the function more efficient. The GC and senior team members may best understand which processes AI could change. But they are also managing transactions, contracts, disputes, regulatory issues and business stakeholders every day. That leaves them little time to lead a transformation.
In the past, secondments were used mostly to solve a capacity problem – maternity cover, attrition, a vacant position, a transaction or a sudden increase in workload. Today, we are seeing them solve a transformation problem as well.
Sometimes that means bringing in someone with a specific capability – legal operations, privacy, compliance, contracting or transformation experience – for a defined period. At other times, the secondee need not be the transformation specialist at all. An experienced commercial lawyer could take over part of the team’s BAU workload for six months. That frees the permanent team to lead the AI rollout themselves.
We saw this with a client, a personal care manufacturer. Its legal team was preparing to roll out a contract automation tool it had built in-house. Before the tool could go live, there was groundwork to do. A secondee helped the team clean up its existing contracts and templates, identify duplicates and bring the templates into a consistent format. The secondee also took on some BAU contracting. That gave the legal team the bandwidth to focus on the automation itself.
It was a simple but useful reminder that transformation does not make the day-to-day work disappear. Here, the secondee did both jobs. They prepared the ground for the tool, and took enough of the daily load off the team for it to lead the project.
The shape of the team to come
The professionals we speak with are thinking differently too. Many know that technical legal knowledge alone is no longer enough for the nextphase of their careers. They are asking about AI, legal technology, privacy and legal operations, and about building stronger commercial and stakeholder-management skills.
This does not mean every lawyer needs to become a technologist. As AI handles more routine legal work, the capabilities that are harder to automate – judgment, commercial understanding, communication, stakeholder management and the ability to navigate ambiguity – will become even more valuable. These are also the skills GCs look for in a secondee, who has to step into an unfamiliar team and be useful from the first week.
I don’t believe the future legal team will simply be a smaller version of today’s team, plus AI. I think it is more likely to be a strong permanent core, supported by technology, with a flexible layer of capability around it. That layer could include secondees, fractional professionals, legal operations specialists, privacy and compliance professionals, and other experts brought in as requirements change.
For General Counsel, team planning itself may need to evolve. Before opening the next permanent position, it may help to ask the same questions we ask clients. What problem are we trying to solve? What capability do we actually need? How long will we need it? And does it need to be a permanent hire?
AI may not replace your legal team. But if the conversations I am having across the market are any indication, it is already changing how we think about who should be part of that team, and what the next legal hire might look like.
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