The modern in-house lawyer: Combining AI, influence, and business impact

The future of in-house legal belongs to professionals who can combine AI-powered productivity with business influence, strategic judgment, and trusted relationships. 

For years, in-house legal departments have been asked to do more with less. Today, generative AI may finally make that possible. But as technology reshapes how legal work gets done, a bigger question is emerging: what will distinguish the lawyers who thrive from those who simply keep pace? 

According to Sterling Miller, the answer is not AI alone. It is what lawyers do with the capacity AI creates. 

Over a career spanning leadership roles at American Airlines, Travelocity, Sabre, Marketo, and now as COO, General Counsel, and Senior Counsel at Hilgers PLLC, Miller has witnessed multiple waves of change in the legal profession. Yet he believes the current moment is different. AI is not merely another technology tool; it is a catalyst forcing lawyers to rethink how they create value inside their organizations. 

The lawyers who succeed in the next decade will not simply be the fastest adopters of generative AI. They will be the professionals who pair technological leverage with business acumen, internal influence and strategic visibility. They will use AI to scale their output while investing more time in relationships, judgment and leadership. 

In other words, they will stop thinking like legal specialists and start operating like business partners. 

AI is transforming legal work and raising expectations 

Miller freely admits he never considered himself a technology enthusiast. “I’m not a technology nerd,” he says. “I did not take computer programming. I just am entranced with technology.” 

That perspective matters because it reflects how many in-house lawyers approach AI today. Most are not software engineers or data scientists. They are practical problem-solvers looking for better ways to serve the business. When Miller first experimented with ChatGPT while writing a book on productivity, he was not searching for a revolutionary new technology. He was looking for a better way to work. 

What he discovered changed his thinking almost immediately. “Within ten minutes I was so blown away by what you could do with it that I stopped writing the book because I realized this is going to be a huge productivity boost for in-house lawyers.” 

His reaction mirrors what many legal leaders have experienced over the past two years. After decades of incremental legal technology improvements, generative AI feels fundamentally different. It does not simply organize information. It helps create, analyze, refine and accelerate legal work. Contract review, research, drafting, negotiation preparation, brainstorming, checklist creation, and knowledge management can all be completed faster and often more effectively. 

For legal departments, that matters because the profession has spent years confronting the same stubborn equation: increasing complexity without a corresponding increase in resources. Regulatory obligations continue to expand. Businesses move faster. Expectations rise. Yet budgets and headcount rarely keep pace. General counsel have long been asked to “do more with less,” even when there were few realistic ways to achieve that outcome. 

Generative AI may be the first technology capable of genuinely changing that equation. 

Miller often points to contracts as one of the clearest examples. Activities that once required hours of manual effort can now be accelerated through AI-powered analysis. Modern tools can compare redlines against market standards, identify negotiation risks, suggest fallback language and help lawyers prepare for conversations with counterparties. 

“A negotiation playbook that would take you hours to build, it can do in minutes,” he says. 

Viewed through that lens, AI is not simply a productivity tool. It is a capacity multiplier. It gives legal departments the opportunity to absorb growing workloads without automatically adding people resources. More importantly, it enables lawyers to spend less time on repetitive administrative tasks and more time on work that requires experience, judgment and commercial understanding. 

But Miller is equally clear about the need for balance. The excitement surrounding AI should not obscure the responsibilities that come with using it. Questions of confidentiality, privilege, governance, data security, and vendor oversight remain essential. Legal departments must not only determine how to use AI effectively within their own teams but also help establish the governance frameworks that guide responsible use across the wider organization. 

The objective is not simply adoption. It is thoughtful adoption. That means creating policies that reflect the reality that employees will use AI. It means understanding where data is stored, how it is processed and whether it is being used to train public models. It means educating teams about appropriate use cases and helping the business distinguish between productive experimentation and unnecessary risk. 

Most importantly, it means preserving what Miller describes as the role of the “human in the middle.” 

“You cannot abdicate your role as the lawyer,” he warns. “You can’t stop being a lawyer. AI will not replace lawyers, but lawyers who know how to use AI will replace those that do not” 

That principle becomes even more important as AI continues to evolve. If generative AI helps lawyers create work faster, agentic AI promises something even more significant: the ability to delegate entire workflows. Rather than simply generating content, future systems may coordinate tasks, gather information, prepare briefings, monitor developments and execute actions across multiple systems. 

Imagine an AI agent reviewing your calendar, researching everyone you will meet that week, compiling briefing documents, tracking developments relevant to your business and preparing meeting notes before you have opened your laptop. Tasks that once consumed hours could increasingly happen in the background. 

For legal departments, that creates extraordinary opportunities. But it also raises a more important question: if technology is handling more of the work, where should lawyers invest the time it creates? That question may ultimately define the future of the profession. 

As routine work becomes easier to automate, businesses will spend less time evaluating legal teams on how efficiently they process documents and more time evaluating them on the quality of their strategic contribution. The expectation will shift from legal expertise alone to business impact. 

The future of legal is not about replacing lawyers with technology. It is about elevating lawyers to higher-value work. And that is where the real opportunity begins. 

The skills AI cannot replace 

One of the most formative lessons of Miller’s career came while serving as GC at Travelocity. At the time, he viewed his role through a traditional lens. “I was like, I’m the legal guy. I spot legal issues and I don’t worry about the other stuff,” he recalls. 

His CEO quickly challenged that mindset. “She was, ‘No, I want you to worry about the other stuff. I value your opinion. You’re at the table – have a take.’” 

That conversation captures the evolution of modern in-house legal leadership more clearly than any discussion about technology. Technical legal expertise remains essential. But inside most organizations, it is also largely assumed. The business rarely evaluates lawyers on the sophistication of their legal analysis. Instead, it evaluates them on responsiveness, judgment, creativity, commercial awareness and their ability to help solve problems. 

As Miller puts it: “They only know: are you responsive? Are you creative? Are you easy to deal with? Do you keep your word?” 

The most influential in-house lawyers understand this intuitively. They do not approach meetings looking for reasons a proposal cannot move forward. They arrive understanding the business objective and looking for ways to achieve it. 

“Lead with, ‘Here’s how we’re going to do it,’” Miller advises. “Not with, ‘These are all the reasons why we can’t do it.’” 

That mindset begins with business fluency. Lawyers who understand how their company makes money, how customers buy, what drives growth, and where leadership wants to take the business can frame legal advice in commercial terms. They become collaborators rather than gatekeepers. 

“You have to understand how the business makes money,” Miller says. “If you don’t understand that, you’re never going to be seen as someone who’s really valuable to the business.” 

This is where in-house legal strategy becomes more than matter management, contract turnaround times or risk mitigation. The modern legal team must understand the commercial realities shaping the organization. If the company is entering a new market, legal should be thinking ahead about regulatory obligations, local expertise and business readiness. If leadership is focused on growth, legal should understand how it can help accelerate deals without creating unnecessary risk. If customer experience matters, legal should ask whether its processes make it easier or harder for customers to buy. 

That is the difference between a legal team that supports the business and a business partner legal team that actively helps shape outcomes. 

Influence also depends on visibility. Many lawyers assume good work speaks for itself. Miller believes that is one of the profession’s biggest misconceptions. “If you think the business is recognizing all the awesome work from the legal department all the time, they’re not.” 

Visibility is not about ego. It is about helping the organization understand the value legal creates. There is a significant difference between arrogance and articulating impact. Sharing lessons from major transactions, running post-mortems after important projects, demonstrating how legal accelerated a commercial outcome or translating legal work into business results helps the organization see legal as a contributor to growth, not merely a cost center. 

Miller’s mantra is simple: always be marketing. Not marketing yourself as a celebrity. Marketing the value you and your team create. 

That value is often created through relationships. Career progression and influence inside organizations are rarely determined solely by output. They are built on trust. For lawyers who dislike networking, Miller offers simple advice: ask people how they got to the company. Learn about their career path, their previous roles, why they joined the business and what they enjoy about their work. One conversation can become the foundation for a stronger working relationship. 

Those relationships matter because influence is earned, not assigned. People invite lawyers into important conversations when they believe those lawyers will add value. They seek legal input early when they trust the person giving it. They listen to recommendations when legal understands the business context, not just the legal risk. 

As AI becomes more capable, that reality becomes more important. Technology can process information. It cannot build trust or understand organizational history. It cannot navigate the emotional and political dynamics that often shape business decisions. Those remain uniquely human advantages. 

This is where AI and influence intersect most powerfully. The legal departments that gain the most from AI will not simply be the ones that process contracts faster. They will be the ones that reinvest newly created capacity into relationship-building, strategic thinking, business engagement and leadership. 

Before legal teams can reach that point, however, they need to avoid the habits that limit influence. Miller sees familiar mistakes: lawyers who lead with “no” instead of solutions, elevate every risk equally, stay invisible while expecting recognition, allow legal priorities to drift away from business priorities, or place too much confidence in AI outputs that still require careful review. None of these is a technology problem. They are mindset problems. 

A lawyer who reflexively says no becomes a blocker. A lawyer who explains options becomes a partner. A lawyer who identifies every possible issue may be technically correct, but a lawyer who helps the business understand which issues truly matter is far more valuable. A lawyer who waits for recognition may remain invisible. A lawyer who communicates value builds influence. 

The same is true of AI. The fact that an answer is polished does not make it correct. The fact that it arrives quickly does not make it complete. Effective lawyers will use AI enthusiastically, but they will also verify assumptions, test conclusions, and apply their own judgment before relying on the results. 

In the end, the lawyers who stand out will not be those who treat AI as a substitute for judgment. They will be those who use it as a tool to create more space for the work only humans can do. 

Thriving in the age of controlled chaos 

The future in-house lawyer will look very different from the archetype many legal professionals were trained to become. Legal expertise will remain essential, but it will no longer be the sole differentiator. The lawyers who thrive will be those who can combine legal judgment with technological fluency, commercial awareness, strong relationships, and the ability to influence outcomes across the business. 

In many ways, this evolution reflects the reality of modern in-house practice. Businesses move quickly. Priorities shift. New risks emerge without warning. Legal teams are expected to navigate uncertainty while helping the organization achieve its goals. It is an environment Miller describes as “controlled chaos,” a phrase that will resonate with anyone who has spent time inside a corporate legal department. 

The challenge is not to eliminate that chaos. It is to operate effectively within it and be comfortable doing so. 

Generative and agentic AI will undoubtedly play a central role in that future. They will help legal teams scale productivity, automate routine tasks, and manage growing workloads. But while technology can amplify output, it cannot replace the qualities that make in-house lawyers truly valuable. Influence, trust, judgment, communication, and strategic thinking remain deeply human capabilities, and they will only become more important as AI becomes more capable. 

For today’s legal professionals, the opportunity is clear. Use AI to create capacity, but invest that capacity wisely. Build stronger relationships across the business. Increase your visibility and demonstrate the value that legal creates. Develop a deeper understanding of how your organization operates, grows, and heads. 

Because the future of in-house legal is not about choosing between technology and people. It is about mastering both. 

The lawyers who succeed in that balance will do far more than adapt to the AI era. They will help define what leadership looks like within it.