December 08, 2025

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The legal profession has a problem, and it starts in the classroom.

For most lawyers, the path to professional success is remarkably linear: excel at school, ace your exams, earn your qualifications, and master the art of delivering the ‘right answer.’

This conditioning, drilled into us from an early age, creates professionals who are excellent at serving up correct responses to authority figures.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: insistence on proving yourself ‘right’ is a toxic behaviour.

The Sycophancy Trap

Consider how AI systems interact with users. Recent research shows these tools are deliberately sycophantic, enthusiastically affirming users’ correctness regardless of accuracy. The reason is straightforward: people who feel validated as geniuses return more often, driving growth for AI companies. Even when users recognise this manipulation, they still prefer a sycophantic AI over an accurate AI.

For lawyers already conditioned to prioritise correctness, this creates a troubling dynamic. The attachment to being right becomes self-reinforcing, even when organisations need something different. Businesses don’t need legal teams to have the right answer, they need collaborative groups capable of developing the best answer for complex situations. When lawyers lead with certainty rather than inquiry, they limit what’s possible.

Fear the Right Things

Conversations about AI in legal circles tend to focus on existential concerns: will the technology replace us, and what happens when it fails? These fears miss the mark.

Ray Dalio, writing in his book Principles, offers a more productive target for professional anxiety: the unknown. Rather than fearing technology or change itself, Dalio suggests fearing the gaps in our understanding, the blind spots, biases, and assumptions that training conditions us to accept without question. He describes his own transition from optimising for correctness to optimising for curiosity as an eighteen-month process, underscoring that this represents fundamental professional rewiring rather than surface-level adjustment.

Productive curiosity asks uncomfortable questions. What assumptions am I bringing to this problem? How does my training limit my thinking? Where might I be wrong? Most importantly: how do these limitations prevent better solutions from emerging?

Reclaiming Agency

Many legal professionals drift into letting their organisations define their worth, taking on HR responsibilities, company secretary functions, and demands that stretch far beyond core expertise. It happens gradually, almost imperceptibly, until the role becomes unrecognisable.

The challenge isn’t that companies, clients, or technological change exert pressure, they always will. The question is whether lawyers actively shape their response or simply absorb whatever definition of value others impose. Without that active choice, legal teams risk becoming either impossibly overstretched or narrowly confined to work that doesn’t reflect their actual capabilities.

If you allow others to define your value, they will define it in ways that don’t necessarily align with your true value proposition.

The most important word for lawyers looking at the future of the profession is agency.

Discarding Limiting Identities

Several professional identities, despite their continued prevalence in legal circles, deserve retirement.

The ‘trusted advisor’ model, while superficially appealing, promotes passivity. It suggests sitting in place, waiting for others to seek out wisdom. This frames legal value as reactive, something accessed during a crisis rather than integrated into strategic thinking. More problematically, it often prioritises status over service, focusing on how lawyers are perceived rather than how they contribute.

Similarly, positioning efficiency as a core value proposition proves limiting. Efficiency matters, it’s why humans invented the wheel and abandoned horses as primary transport. But efficiency as a defining characteristic inspires no one. More critically, efficiency optimisation often means accelerating flawed processes without questioning their underlying value. Reducing NDA review time from 2.3 days to 2.2 days means nothing if reviewing every NDA was unnecessary to begin with.

The ‘silver bullet’ identity—the lawyer who emerges from obscurity to save the day with brilliant insights, creates perverse incentives. When crisis intervention generates the most recognition, lawyers may unconsciously encourage conditions that require heroic intervention. Meanwhile, business colleagues learn they can take greater risks because the law will eventually rescue them. This dynamic escalates rather than resolves problems.

What You Are: Product Builders

It’s time for a radical reframe: Legal teams build products.

A more productive framing positions legal teams as product builders. This perspective shift opens new strategic conversations.

The VRIO framework for competitive advantage provides a useful structure here: Valuable, Rare, Inimitable, Organised.

Valuable:  Does the resource add value by enabling opportunities or defending against strategic threats?  On this, legal clearly holds the potential for value, though the profession must abandon the ‘cost centre’ mentality that undermines this. Legal represents investment.  Quality investments cost money, requiring no apology.

Rare: Rarity becomes contextual. What makes a particular legal team unique? Language capabilities, unusual experience combinations, exceptional communication skills, or particular domain expertise all contribute to distinctiveness. Teams that approach legal work identically to every other legal department cannot claim rarity.

Inimitable: Inimitability presents the crucial test. Could another group of lawyers slot seamlessly into a legal team’s role and deliver identical results? If so, that team hasn’t achieved inimitability. This quality emerges from deep understanding of company culture and values, internal relationship building, specific organisational needs and the development of tailored workflow. Cookie-cutter legal approaches cannot be inimitable.

Organised: Once you have something inimitable, a kernel of competitive advantage, you push resources behind it. Think of all the energies in an organisation as arrows in a box. Are they all pointing in roughly the same direction? That’s organisation.

Know Your Customer

The product-building framework demands clarity about customers and their needs. Lawyers often struggle with this, relying on assumptions rather than evidence.

The key is engaging in genuine customer discovery with true customer success conversations: examining what worked, what didn’t, and implementing visible changes.

This matters because lawyers may be solving problems that don’t exist or missing problems that do. If business colleagues view legal work as mysterious rituals performed for unclear reasons, legal teams should view that perception as urgent feedback requiring investigation. The first honest conversation about whether legal work actually addresses business needs may prove uncomfortable, but it’s where authentic value creation begins.

Pushing through this discomfort proves essential. Rapid change often occurs after extended periods of seemingly minimal progress. Small shifts, creating space for teams to surface and test ideas, celebrating experiments regardless of outcome, building cultures of learning, generate momentum that eventually reaches critical mass.

A Practice, Not a Destination

Agency, curiosity, and open-mindedness represent ongoing practices rather than achievable endpoints. They require conscious cultivation and consistent application.

For lawyers conditioned to provide right answers, this represents profound professional evolution. It means entering conversations with questions rather than solutions. It means seeking disconfirming evidence rather than defending positions. It means building collaborative relationships rather than maintaining expert distance.

The alternative, clinging to traditional identities and approaches in a transforming landscape, offers only diminishing relevance. The future belongs to legal professionals willing to examine their conditioning, question their assumptions, and build something new.

Disclaimer: This post features insights from a guest author. Elevate occasionally invites select industry voices to share their perspectives on topics of interest to our audience. The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Elevate.

We were proud to have Andy as our keynote speaker and panellist for our Knowledge and Networking Event, ‘Future Proofing In-House Legal Teams’ in London, UK, as part of the Elevate Global Event Series in October 2025.