AI tools are helping people draft grievances, customer complaints and GDPR requests, creating more correspondence for in-house legal teams to sift through. Dentons says interviews with senior lawyers at companies in Ireland also found AI use concentrated on narrow, repetitive tasks, rather than being handed free rein over legal work.
Watch Desk analysis
What happened
The report, From AI Adoption to AI Advantage, draws on interviews with senior in-house lawyers at eir, Flipdish, Mastercard, Gilead Sciences, Uniphar and Wayflyer. Dentons’ Dublin-based technology, media and telecommunications partners Carlo Salizzo and David Kirton conducted the research.
The Scottish Legal News account says interviewees described the main challenge as working out which parts of AI-generated correspondence matter, not simply reading it. Some legal teams are using AI themselves to help manage the volume. Many companies also emphasised centralising legal data, and almost every interviewee described AI use for narrow, well-scoped repetitive tasks.
Why it matters
AI is changing the work arriving at legal departments as well as the work happening inside them. A flood of plausible-looking letters can turn triage into the hard part, while a patchwork of tools and scattered data makes careful handling harder. There is a modest irony in using AI to help deal with paperwork created with AI, but the workload is a practical issue, not a slogan.
The report also describes changing relationships between in-house lawyers and external counsel. Some clients are exploring alternatives to the billable hour, while better-prepared clients are bringing more technical challenges to their lawyers.
Our read
The useful finding here is not that legal departments have discovered a magic button. It is that AI adoption has consequences on both sides of the inbox, and that teams are pairing limited automation with governance and data centralisation. The research is based on interviews, not a measure of how common these effects are across the whole legal sector, but it gives organisations concrete questions to ask: what is arriving, where does the information live, and who decides what deserves attention?
What to watch
- Whether legal teams expand AI use for sorting and triaging incoming correspondence.
- How companies organise legal data and involve teams beyond the legal department in AI governance.
- Whether alternatives to hourly billing become more common as AI changes legal work.
Discussion spark: If AI makes it easier to generate complaints and legal requests, should organisations use AI to triage the resulting volume, or risk automating decisions about whose case gets attention?
Sources and evidence
- Source update (28 October 2026, 09:00 UTC)
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