Companies’ in-house lawyers have long allocated high-volume, low-value tech-based work to legal service providers rather than to fully-fledged law firms — because doing so has been cheaper and more efficient. But, now, generative AI looks set to change the economics again, and affect these alternative providers as much as the rest of the industry.

New artificial intelligence tools are already disrupting the former disrupters, by enabling clients of so-called alternative legal service providers (ALSPs) to bring more of their work in-house. This, in turn, is starting to influence the nature of the work being outsourced to the service providers and their pricing models. There is a sense that generative AI could render unprepared providers obsolescent.

Luis-Xavier Hernandez, group general counsel for beauty and wellbeing at Unilever, says the global consumer goods company has already deployed more than 400 AI systems across its whole business and the legal team is planning to use the technology to deliver services to the organisation in a more “efficient, simplified and digitally enabled way”.