10 Things Every Legal Leader Needs To Know
People Management in the Age of AI
By Erin Wiley | General Counsel, Hiive
People management has always been one of the hardest parts of leading a legal team. You're balancing individual development, workload, personality dynamics, and a practice that never really stops. Add a genuine paradigm shift in how legal work gets done, and the stakes get higher.
AI isn't coming for legal teams - it's already here. And the leaders who will come out ahead aren't necessarily the ones who move fastest. They're the ones who thoughtfully bring their teams along.
Here are 10 things every legal leader needs to know:
Start by identifying the right opportunities
Not every task is a good candidate for AI. The ones that are tend to share a few traits: they're repeatable, lower-risk, and, honestly, a little annoying to do manually. Ask your team what they do regularly that feels like it shouldn't require a lawyer's brain. That question tends to surface better AI use cases than any vendor pitch. The goal is to take work off your team's plate so they have more space for the thinking that actually needs them.
Resist the urge to collect tools
Less is more. One tool with strong integrations will almost always outperform a stack of five tools that each do one thing. It's more cost-effective, lighter, and reduces friction. Whatever you choose, stress-test it regularly, not just at onboarding. Tools that worked six months ago may have been surpassed, and gaps you didn't notice then might be obvious now.
Invest in real training
Knowing a tool exists isn't the same as knowing how to use it well. Does your team understand how to build the right foundational prompts? Do they know the full functionality, not just the obvious features? For your legal ops leads and more junior lawyers, it may even be worth exploring whether some coding basics are worth their time. When people feel genuinely competent with a tool, they use it. When they feel uncertain, they don't, even if they're supposed to.
Consider whether you need technical help
Building AI-agentic capabilities is harder than it looks. The skills required take time to develop, and some of what's possible actually requires engineering talent. This doesn't mean every legal team needs a dedicated developer. But it's worth asking whether there's someone, inside or outside the organization, who can partner with your team on the build side so your lawyers can focus on the use and the judgment.
Help your team stay current - from both directions
There are two different things to keep up with: what AI can do for lawyers, and what AI means legally. New tools and use cases are emerging constantly. So are privilege issues, new regulations, and enterprise risk questions that legal teams are increasingly being asked to weigh in on. Consider creating a daily AI news digest that surfaces what matters. Regular training on best practices for use is also worth the time. In this environment, your lawyers' judgment is more important than ever, not less - it's the thing that makes AI-assisted work products actually reliable.
Create psychological safety around the learning curve
We are all building out our AI expertise while running full practices at the same time. That's a lot to hold. Create space for your team to share what's working, surface blockers, and admit what they haven't figured out yet. And acknowledge that AI burnout is real. The constant pressure to adopt, adapt, and optimize takes a toll. Naming that for your team doesn't slow them down - it usually helps them move through it faster.
Be a coordinator, not just a cheerleader
Once people start exploring AI on their own, they often end up duplicating each other's work without realizing it. Two lawyers may be independently building workflows to solve the same problem. Use your 1:1s to ask people what they're working on and which use cases they've identified. This keeps you aware of what's happening across the team and lets you spot opportunities to extend something useful to everyone rather than rebuilding it twice.
Make AI part of your strategic roadmap
Legal teams no longer have the option of treating AI as an afterthought or a side experiment. If it's not in your strategic planning, you're behind. That doesn't mean overhauling everything at once. It means being intentional - building AI into your priorities, your resourcing conversations, and your vision for what the team is working toward. Lead on this, and your team will take it seriously.
Be clear about expectations and embed them in performance
If AI adoption is expected - and in most in-house environments, it increasingly is - say so clearly. Don't leave people to guess what good looks like. But also recognize that "good" will look different depending on the work. A commercial lawyer and a litigator are not going to have identical AI use cases. Define what success looks like for each person's portfolio, and give them a real path to get there.
Adopt a creator mentality
I recently came across a framework by Sherry Heyl that's stuck with me. She describes three mindsets people bring to AI adoption: poverty (constant fear that AI is coming for your job), survival (adopting AI frantically just to be seen doing it), and creator (adopting AI with intentionality and agency). The survival mindset is the one I see most in legal circles right now, and it's the most dangerous - not because it leads to bad tools, but because it leads to performative adoption that doesn't actually change anything. The creator mindset is different. It asks: What would I build if I approached this as an opportunity? What does a better version of my practice look like? That's the question worth sitting with. And it's the one worth bringing to your team.
The AI moment in legal is real. The leaders who meet it with intention - not anxiety, not performance - will build something worth building.
Erin Wiley is General Counsel at Hiive. Here’s what she had to say about her membership experience with The GC Collective.
"As GC, you're often the only person in the room who does what you do. The GC Collective changed that for me. In an era where the legal function is supposed to be getting smarter through AI, I've found the most clarifying conversations happening with other GCs - talking honestly about the hard calls, the messy parts of leading a team, the things you don't always name out loud. I leave those conversations with better questions, not just better answers. That's not something a workflow can replace."
