From Templates to Strategy: AI and the New Legal Edge

By Fabiano Deffenti | 26 January 2026

For decades, the legal services market had a comfortable illusion: if you had the “right firm” you would also have the “right documents”. The logic was almost mechanical – a large template database, together with checklists populated by junior lawyers, and an end product looked sophisticated enough to justify the invoice.

That model is now structurally weakened, not because law became simpler, but because the template layer of legal work has been commoditised.

AI can now produce competent documents, clause alternatives, checklists and negotiation playbooks in minutes. Templates that once signalled “premium” have become widely replicable, fast, and cheap. This does not make legal problems smaller. It simply moves the value away from the production line and toward the decision-maker.

The consequence is straightforward: the client’s decision is no longer about choosing the firm with the thickest precedent bank.

Moreover, the hyper-specialisation that large law firms have encouraged and, often, imposed on junior lawyers invariably leaves material knowledge and experience gaps that can be extremely costly to clients – either by missing important issues (when the matter is handled by a single or several specialists) or by costing the client much more than it should (by having a multitude of lawyers handling the case).

Thus, more than ever before it is about choosing the lawyer who can turn the problem into a strategy by defining the objective, mapping risks and driving an optimum outcome.

AI Made Big Law Templates a Commodity

A large share of what clients historically paid “premium” rates for was not the brilliance of the document – it was the firm’s industrial capacity to produce, validate, and standardise documents.

AI has dismantled that scarcity.

None of this means lawyers are obsolete. It means the value centre moved.

If a capable draft can be produced quickly, the differentiator is no longer “having the template”. The differentiator becomes:

• choosing the right structure (not just the right wording);
• deciding what matters and what does not;
• sequencing decisions to preserve leverage;
• building enforceability into the real world;
• aligning legal terms with commercial and operational reality; and
• ensuring the strategy can be executed.

That is strategic lawyering, not form-filling.

Hyper-Specialisation Produces Precision – But Also Blind Spots

The market incentivised specialisation early in lawyers’ careers. The result is a profession that can be brilliant at a slice of the problem while missing the overall architecture.

A hyper-specialised lawyer may be exceptional in very specific issues – yet the client’s problem is rarely confined to one channel. More often, it involves:

• a commercial decision (pricing; margin; leverage);
• a legal document (contract; policy; corporate approvals);
• a compliance posture (regulators; reporting; audits);
• a people reality (incentives; internal adoption; politics);
• a dispute posture (evidence; procedure; remedies; forum); and
• a timeline (funding, product launch, board cycles, other parties’ deadlines).

The risk is not that specialists are “wrong”. The risk is that everyone is right inside their silo and the client still loses because the whole is incoherent.

This is where the strategic lawyer sits: not above specialists, but between them: integrating inputs, identifying contradictions, setting priorities and turning legal advice into an executable plan.

The Modern Lawyer’s Job is Variable Analysis

A strategic lawyer does not replace technical expertise. The strategic lawyer orchestrates it.

Think of the strategic lawyer’s role as the person who will advise you on managing a portfolio of legal variables under uncertainty. A strategic lawyer’s output is not “a contract”. It is a decision structure the architecture that makes the deal workable, the compliance posture defensible, and the dispute posture controlled.

Large firms are not incapable of strategy. The issue is incentive design.

When profitability depends on leverage (large teams) and focuses on profitability (minimum daily billable hours) the ‘template-plus-process model’ is rational. But as the template layer has become a commodity, the traditional system struggles to justify itself on the same terms.

Clients can increasingly obtain good documents without paying the historical tax of the institutional process. Instead, they should pay for what cannot be commoditised: judgment, integration, prioritisation, negotiation design, governance, and accountability for outcomes.

The Practical Choice

With AI, the edge is no longer the template, and the problem is no longer ‘lack of numbers’ (that is, lawyers who can do the work). The real risk is to have issues fall between the cracks and to be overcharged for work that can be handled by very small teams of experienced lawyers.

And here is the cheeky truth: AI did most of the writing for this article. What it did not do (and still cannot do) is decide what needed to be said, why it mattered, which variables to prioritise, and how to connect them into a coherent strategy with lateral thinking. That part is the work that strategic lawyers do.

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Brazil Corporate law

Last modified: 16 February 2026