Picture the most ordinary task your legal team touches, a supplier renewal, and hold it in mind as this guide moves to 2040. In one future your company built the system that clears it. In another, your general counsel conducts a network of outside services. In a third, providers own the machinery and you rent it. In a fourth, a person can still say stop, though whether that order holds is an open fight. The task is identical in all four. The person who answers for it is not.
Use the futures to pressure-test a real decision about people, technology and providers. A way to consider three kinds of change together: the legal practices people rely on, experiments that could change them, and alternatives worth developing. They can coexist rather than arrive in a fixed sequence. connects what to preserve, what to test and what to start building, all at the same time.
When your legal work runs on a system somebody built, who can still change its answer, and who pays when nobody can? Each future settles it differently. Read all four before deciding which one your current decisions are building.
The company builds legal checks into the tools employees already use to get work done. It gains speed and reach, and it becomes answerable for every decision the software clears before a lawyer sees it.
Step into this future ↗
The legal team keeps the company’s data and buys everything else on its own standards. The price is coordination that never ends: every provider added is a dependency the general counsel now owns.
Step into this future ↗
No provider ever asks for the company's operating knowledge outright. It moves out one renewal at a time, because each handover is the economically sensible choice on the day. By the time the lock-in is easy to see, it is big enough to decide who holds the relationship.
Step into this future ↗
A person stays connected to every material decision. The say is only real if that person can read the system, question it, and issue a stop order they will actually use. The same person has to be able to observe, trace, and audit what happened, because the duty to answer for the decision, fiduciary duty included, never left them.
Step into this future ↗This work starts from the corporate legal chair, but the questions reach anyone who builds, buys, delivers or relies on legal help.
A contract can promise your data back. Whether you can change a service, check a result or act without a provider’s help depends on who runs the systems day to day. Read your renewals for operational control as well as the paper kind.
A title does not carry authority. A reviewer who cannot see the system’s reasoning, or who lacks standing to stop it, is a signature line. The fourth future asks what would make the review real, and keeps the answer contested.
People who cannot afford help, or cannot contest an automated answer, are the stress test of every future here. The consumer and small-business perspective sets the bar: affordable help, fair treatment and a live route of appeal when the system is wrong.
You do not have to choose between running today’s legal function and building the next one. Three Horizons holds both jobs, and the experiments between them, in one budget conversation: what must keep working, what you are testing, and what you want the tests to make possible.
Maintain the institutions, expertise and practices that people still need.
Try different tools or services and examine what they improve, and what they leave unresolved.
Develop alternatives that could change how legal work is delivered and who can get help.
Put the renewal on the table and seat four readers around it: the buyer of legal work, the seller, the toolmaker, and the person who needs help. Each reads the same four futures and comes back with a different list of moves. Start with the seat that is yours, then read the other three as your counterparties’ opening positions, because whichever future arrives, they will be in it with you.
Decide which work, knowledge and decisions the organization needs to retain.
Explore this perspective ↗Change how services are delivered while developing expertise and client relationships.
Explore this perspective ↗Make tools work with customer systems and show useful results.
Explore this perspective ↗Make legal help affordable, fair and open to challenge when something goes wrong.
Explore this perspective ↗