What Legal Can Learn About AI From Enterprise IT

AI has moved legal technology from primarily back-office support and select tasks like research and document management to the core of legal service delivery. This shift brings legal tech more in line with Enterprise IT.  Legal professionals should watch what is happening in the broader Enterprise IT market, and you'll see legal's future.

IT has become the delivery engine for global banking and retail. AI is positioning legal on the same path. What banks and insurers do today, law firms will do tomorrow. AWS re:Invent 2025 and Gartner's recent analysis are not just tech updates. They serve as a good insight into where we are with Enterprise IT and as a roadmap for the future of legal technology. While legal debates AI adoption, financial services, retail, and insurance are already running agentic workflows in production. They handle sensitive data with the security standards law firms need. The path forward isn't uncharted. Enterprise IT is showing the way.

What Enterprise IT Has Figured Out

Enterprise IT has moved past experimentation. At AWS re:Invent, the focus was on real implementation and how orchestration secures complex agent interactions. Banks now run customer-facing agents that communicate directly with internal systems. Orchestration handles transactions and sensitive data autonomously and safely. Legal needs this same sophistication. The productivity gains from AI will come from complex workflows, not from typing questions into a chat bot. The financial services industry has figured this out and built production systems implementing agentic workflows. Law firms can follow.

Gartner underscores the importance of Domain-specific language models (“DSLM”) in enterprise use cases. These smaller models cost less, run faster, and provide better security than general-purpose alternatives. Gartner predicts substantial enterprise adoption of DSLM. Gartner tracks venture capital as a forecasting signal. The money is shifting toward specialized, domain-specific systems. The security concerns that worry legal professionals are being solved in these enterprise implementations. Banks and insurers run agentic workflows on sensitive proprietary data. Strict orchestration maintains control.

Legal's Position

Legal has excellent raw data for domain-specific models and use cases, including curated case law, statutory databases, contract collections, and legal work product. Firms that invest in high-quality legal data now will have better AI systems later. This puts legal practice in the mainstream of Enterprise IT for the first time. AI touches the core work lawyers do. Legal technology becomes as central to law firms as IT systems are to a bank's delivery of financial services.

Based on enterprise trends, production deployment of agentic workflows in legal technology is the future. Firms preparing now by understanding their data and security requirements will implement these workflows successfully. Firms still debating AI directions or focused on chatbots will fall behind competitors who are learning from other industries.