A framework for discussing change through three overlapping patterns: what works today, experiments in transition, and a different future beginning to take shape. A horizon describes a pattern, rather than a deadline. helps leaders consider three kinds of work at the same time: sustaining today’s legal services, testing different approaches, and developing alternatives. It gives lawyers and business leaders a way to discuss what to preserve, where to experiment and what they want those experiments to achieve.
The four scenarios explore how legal work could be organized. The three horizons help us think about changing it. H1, H2 and H3 can all be present today. They are not three deadlines, and H3 does not predict which scenario will happen.
Conceptual diagram. The curves show changing patterns, not measured data, probabilities or a timetable.
Courts, professional expertise, working practices and trusted relationships still meet important needs. This horizon examines what remains useful and where the current approach struggles with cost, delay or access.
What must keep working while we make changes?
New tools, services and rules can improve today’s approach or make a different one possible. This horizon examines experiments and the choices behind them. An experiment’s longer-term value may remain uncertain.
What would this experiment help us learn, and what might it change?
This horizon examines a different way legal work could operate, together with early examples that point toward it. The groups considered new professional roles, services built on shared technology, wider access to help and different ways to establish trust.
What future are we trying to support, and what could we start developing now?
These examples show how to use the framework. They were written for this guide, separate from the workshop proposals.
Maintain reviews, approvals and clear responsibility for exceptions while the business continues making agreements.
Try automated checks on one type of agreement. Compare the results with existing review and use the findings to decide what to change.
Consider a model that tracks obligations throughout an agreement’s life, with lawyers focused on judgment, exceptions and ways to resolve problems.
Participants considered examples of change alongside their own proposals. These summaries show what each group discussed; individual ideas have not been assigned to a particular horizon here.
How people decide whom to trust; who should be licensed to provide legal services; AI oversight; and a proposal to give chief legal officers a stronger The group proposed a stronger role for the chief legal officer as a trusted steward with duties to others. The surviving note does not define the proposed legal duties or how that role would be implemented..
Pressure on profit margins, firms combining, different ways to employ specialists and raise capital, and the future of trusted client relationships.
Tools that can exchange data and work together; a proposed API means application programming interface: a defined way for software tools to exchange information or request services. The group proposed a shared interface for legal services; it was an idea discussed, not an implemented standard.; training for new roles; and standards for evaluating and certifying providers.
The cost of legal help, delays in courts and public trust, alongside proposals for simpler standard agreements and more ways to resolve disputes.
An earlier group exercise produced these ideas about law in 2040. They helped identify questions for the workshops. Some conflict with one another; they describe possible futures rather than today’s market or an agreed plan.
In this vision, shared data underpins how legal systems operate. Legal data standards are established, and commercial incentives support contributing to and accessing shared datasets. Trust in AI systems is closely tied to the quality and provenance of the data they are built on.
In this vision, large-scale datasets shape precedent, prediction, and outcomes. Abundant data makes legal capability more widely accessible, but data remains unevenly available, contributing to opacity in parts of the system.
This vision proposes Using a shared digital ledger to record and verify transactions. The workshop vision imagined such records taking on functions performed by institutional intermediaries; it did not establish that this future will occur. shared digital records for verification, agreements and enforcement. Those records would perform some functions now handled by institutions that verify information or transactions.
In this vision, AI reliability supports wider automation of legal reasoning and decision making. Rules are codified into predictive and executable systems with machine judgment at greater speed and consistency.
In this vision, machines interpret rules and carry out routine legal work. People remain important for complex, disputed, strategic or high-consequence decisions.
In this vision, legal services are delivered through integrated systems as well as individuals. As production becomes systematized, differentiation shifts toward strategic judgment, negotiation, creativity, and trusted relationships.
In this vision, legal services are more accessible, lower cost, and embedded across business and society. Law functions more like infrastructure that enables systems and transactions to operate.
In this vision, clients choose providers for judgment, understanding of their circumstances and the way advice fits their needs. Size and staffing matter less as legal capability becomes more widely available.
In this vision, outcomes vary: lawyers as strategic advisers and system designers; or a fragmented profession of specialized experts; or new hybrid roles blurring law, technology, and business.
In this vision, training and apprenticeship are reshaped, but not uniformly. Erosion of entry-level work can create bottlenecks; new alternative credentials and fluid routes also emerge.
In this vision, services deliberately choose where people take part: for empathy, context, ethical judgment, trust or oversight. Other processes involve people less often, raising different questions about responsibility.
In this vision, AI-supported judges, virtual environments, and community-based processes handle a significant share of disputes; physical courts remain important in some contexts.
In this vision, justice varies depending on where and how disputes are resolved, with variation in access, speed, cost, and fairness; bias can be embedded in design or data.
In this vision, regulation is distributed across multiple actors, adaptive in form, and contested. State-led frameworks sit alongside platform, network, and industry-group rules.
In this vision, law is built into products, workflows, and infrastructure. Compliance is continuous and automated; legal requirements are translated into code.
In this vision, a large share of disputes is handled through technology-enabled processes; AI-driven arbitration and automated resolution routes are widely used.
In this vision, legal systems prevent disputes as well as resolve them. Agreements are dynamic and data-driven; contracts function as structured data that helps govern behavior.