Heather Kidd
Senior Editor & Writer
at LawVu
Written by
For decades, legal departments have faced a problem that seemed impossible to solve. As businesses grow, legal work grows with them. More customers create more contracts. More expansion creates more regulatory obligations. More deals create more complexity. The traditional response has always been the same: hire more lawyers, add more resources and work harder to keep up.
But what if legal no longer had to scale that way? What if the function could support exponential growth without a corresponding increase in headcount? What if legal could move from being a reactive service provider to becoming one of the primary drivers of business growth?
According to Eduardo Rastelli, Head of Legal Operations at IHG Hotels & Resorts, that opportunity is now within reach. And it has surprisingly little to do with making lawyers work faster.
“We’re flipping the conversation with the CEOs and CFOs to say, now we’re ready and we want the business to catch up,” he says.
It is a remarkable statement. For years, legal teams have been viewed as a resource the business consumes. Rastelli sees a future where legal becomes a strategic capability that actively enables growth. Artificial intelligence is making that future possible.
The legal profession may be standing at one of its most important inflection points in decades.
The real opportunity isn’t faster lawyers
Much of the conversation around AI in legal has focused on productivity. How can lawyers draft faster? Review contracts more quickly? Process more work with fewer resources? Useful questions, certainly. But they miss the bigger opportunity.
At IHG, Rastelli and his team took a fundamentally different view. “We didn’t want to start at making people thirty percent faster at what they currently do. We just want to get rid of the work,” he says.
That distinction matters. Rather than focusing on helping lawyers complete existing tasks more efficiently, the team began identifying activities that should disappear altogether. Administrative processes, workflow management, document collection, compliance tracking and repetitive review work became prime targets for automation.
The goal was not incremental efficiency. It was creating a legal function capable of scaling alongside a global business with more than 7,000 hotels and over one million rooms.
“We wanted to build a function that dealt with future growth,” Rastelli explains. “It’s impossible to do that just by adding traditional resources to the legal function.”
The result is a profound shift in how legal creates value. Historically, legal teams have been measured by output. How many matters did they complete? How many contracts did they review? How quickly did they respond?
The emerging model measures something different. How much capacity can legal create? How effectively can it enable growth? How strategically can it partner with the business? That requires a different mindset.
“It’s not about how big your team is. It’s not how much stuff you can get through,” says Rastelli. “It’s how you can work with AI, and particularly how you can embed these AI solutions within your current processes and activities to really elevate the performance of the function.”
In that world, legal is no longer trying to keep pace with the business. It is helping determine how fast the business can move.
Building the legal engine room
Rastelli sees AI maturity evolving through three stages: assisted AI, where tools support individual tasks; augmented AI, where AI becomes embedded into workflows and knowledge systems; and agentic AI, where systems can execute end to end processes with minimal human intervention.
Many organizations remain focused on the first two stages. Leading legal functions are beginning to explore the third.
One example he cites involves annual insurance compliance across thousands of hotels. Historically, the process required extensive outreach, document collection and compliance reviews. AI can now handle much of that work automatically, escalating only exceptions that require human judgement.
Rather than processing paperwork, legal professionals can focus on advising hotel owners whose coverage is inadequate or whose risk profile requires intervention.
“Their focus shifts from doing all of that admin work to working with the hotels that aren’t compliant,” says Rastelli.
It is a perfect illustration of the broader transformation underway. The work that disappears is administrative. The work that remains is strategic.
Yet technology alone is not what makes this possible. Structured data, governance, knowledge management, and legal engineering are becoming the foundations of successful AI adoption. As legal content increasingly needs to be understood by machines as well as people, organizations must ensure information is organized, accessible, and reliable.
This is why legal engineers are becoming indispensable. Their role is to translate legal expertise into workflows and machine-readable instructions that AI can execute at scale. Knowledge management, once viewed as a support function, is becoming a strategic capability that directly influences AI performance.
Governance is emerging as another major responsibility. As employees increasingly build and deploy AI agents across organizations, legal teams will play a critical role in managing oversight, risk, compliance, and data controls. Soon, organizations may even require agents that manage agents.
The end of the lawyer as processor
Whenever AI enters the conversation, the same question inevitably follows: what happens to legal jobs?
Rastelli’s answer is refreshingly optimistic. He does not see a future in which legal expertise becomes less important. He sees one in which it becomes more valuable. Routine drafting, document review, and administrative processes are increasingly being automated. But that creates space for lawyers to spend more time on the work they were trained to do: guiding business decisions, managing risk, solving complex problems, and partnering with leadership teams.
The challenge is that this transformation also disrupts the profession’s traditional development model. If AI can perform many of the tasks historically assigned to junior lawyers, how will the next generation learn their craft?
The industry does not yet have all the answers. What is becoming clear, however, is that future legal careers will place greater emphasis on critical thinking, commercial judgement, process design, AI literacy, and strategic advisory skills. The lawyers who thrive will not simply be technical experts. They will be business partners capable of working alongside increasingly sophisticated technology.
For years, legal transformation has been framed as a question of efficiency. How can lawyers work faster? How can teams process more matters? How can costs be reduced?
Rastelli’s vision is far more ambitious. He says the organizations that succeed in the AI era will not simply have more productive legal teams. They will have fundamentally different legal operating models.
For the first time, legal has an opportunity to break free from the idea that growth must always be matched by more headcount. That changes everything.
The future belongs to legal departments that are scalable, operationally sophisticated, and deeply embedded in business strategy.
The future belongs to legal teams that do not merely facilitate growth. They accelerate it.
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