The legal department of 2029 may have fewer traditional lawyers, more technologists, and a new category of colleague that does not appear on the payroll: AI agents.
That is the future envisioned by Deloitte in The AI Imperative: Reshaping of the Legal Industry, a report examining how artificial intelligence is changing the people, processes, and economics of legal work.
Prepared with support from RSGI, the study is based on a survey of 121 senior legal leaders conducted between April and May 2026. Respondents included general counsel, heads of legal, legal operations directors, and managing legal counsel across the UK and Ireland, EMEA, APAC, and the Americas. Deloitte also conducted qualitative interviews with law firm leaders and consulted representatives from academia and the legal technology ecosystem.
The report’s most striking projection is not simply that lawyers will use more AI. It is that the composition of the legal department itself will change.
Deloitte describes today’s typical legal team as 95% lawyers and 5% legal operations professionals. Its illustrative model for three years from now looks considerably different: AI-native lawyers make up the largest human cohort at 50%, followed by hybrid embedded engineers and lawyers at 20%, legal engineers at 10%, and knowledge engineers and legal operations professionals at 5% each.
Alongside that smaller human team, Deloitte projects AI agents supplying capacity equivalent to 30% of today’s workforce. The result would be a legal function able to manage growing demand with fewer people.
In Deloitte’s terminology, AI-native lawyers are professionals trained in an AI-first environment who use the technology as a core part of their daily practice. Legal engineers design the workflows, tools, and systems on which the department operates, while knowledge engineers organize and maintain the legal information and data those systems need. Hybrid roles connect legal expertise with technical engineering inside the department.
Legal operations would not disappear. Deloitte expects the function to expand beyond business-as-usual administration into transformation, change management, and oversight of outside counsel as more routine operational work is automated.
The projected redesign reflects a shift already underway. In 2024, 76% of respondents to Deloitte’s earlier survey reported no AI adoption. In the 2026 study, 61% were actively deploying AI and only 2% reported no adoption.
Legal leaders also expect AI to automate or save 28% of legal work during the next two to three years, while 61% of departments are already experimenting with or piloting agentic AI systems capable of completing multistep tasks.
That does not necessarily mean legal departments will shrink dramatically. Fifty-eight per cent of general counsel expect their teams to remain broadly the same size but undergo meaningful changes in composition, seniority, or skills.
Still, the share expecting smaller teams has doubled since 2024 to 20%, with that view most common in cost-focused sectors such as technology and financial services.
As AI takes on more routine work, Deloitte expects the work left to people to become more complex. That could produce smaller and more senior teams focused on strategic advice, judgement, and sophisticated risk decisions rather than high-volume document work.
The skills expected of those lawyers are changing accordingly. Ninety-six per cent of respondents said technology and AI literacy would grow in importance for in-house lawyers over the next two to three years, followed by learning and adaptability at 89%. Strategic business thinking, critical judgement, and relationship-building also ranked highly.
Technical legal knowledge ranked lowest at 51%—not because Deloitte sees it becoming unimportant, but because it will increasingly be treated as a baseline capability rather than the sole basis of a legal career.
Despite those expectations, workforce planning is lagging. Deloitte says 84% of organizations have not redesigned roles around AI, while skills gaps remain the most frequently cited obstacle to effective adoption. Only 28% have updated workforce plans to incorporate AI skills.
The disruption is particularly significant for junior lawyers. Document-heavy work has historically helped trainees and junior associates develop judgement through experience. If AI absorbs much of that work, legal employers will need new training models.
Survey respondents favoured continuous education and role rotations, cited by 68%, followed by simulations and scenario-based training at 63% and competency-based rather than tenure-based progression at 60%.
The transformation will also reach beyond in-house teams. Eighty-five per cent of respondents believe AI will materially change law firm pricing, while the proportion of outside work billed hourly is expected to fall from 72% today to 44% within two to three years.
Deloitte’s forecast is ultimately less about replacing lawyers than redefining who performs legal work and how. The legal department it describes remains led by people, but those people work alongside agents, engineers, and knowledge specialists in an operating model built around AI from the start.