That gap is the subject of two new chapters contributed by Paul Caddy, Katie Moon and Daniel Solomon of Lewis Silkin to Rising Roles in Law: Designing the AI-Enabled, Data-Driven Law Firm (Globe Law and Business, 2026).

For in-house legal teams and C-suite leaders who have bought the tools but not yet built the capabilities, the chapters tackle two questions that matter right now: who does this work, what skills do they currently have, and what skills do they need?

What the chapters cover

Chapter 5: Legal operations professionals in the AI-enabled law firm

Katie Moon, head of legal design and operations at Lewis Silkin, and Daniel Solomon, portfolio lead for client collaboration, open with a scene that feels uncomfortably familiar: it’s 5pm on a Friday, and an in-house lawyer is about to log off when three urgent requests land in seven minutes: an NDA, a CEO’s acquisition query, and a procurement contract review. The weekend vanishes. This bottleneck, Moon and Solomon argue, is a structural problem that legal operations exists to solve.

Framed through the interconnected themes of people, process, data, and technology, the chapter maps what legal operations professionals actually do and the impact that AI adoption is having on these areas: from intake, triage and process redesign to tool selection and contract data extraction. Three aspects stand out:

• legal operations is no longer purely an in-house function. Law firms are now productising it as a client-facing, revenue-generating service, competing directly with alternative legal service providers and the Big Four consultancies. Moon and Solomon set out how firms can move from ad-hoc projects to a standalone offering;
• legal operations professionals come from varied backgrounds – many of whom are lawyers or studied law – and possess skillsets ranging from process design, project management, technology and change management. These individuals may already be found within a firm’s business teams who are currently focused on how the firm itself can operate in a more streamlined and tech-enabled way.
• Moon (one of the creators of oneNDA, the standardised NDA adopted by thousands of companies worldwide) brings a practical philosophy of simplification. The chapter advocates stripping away complexity: enabling business teams to self-serve on low-risk matters within clear guardrails, so that lawyers can focus on strategic work.

Chapter 9: The AI-enabled professional — skills, culture, and adoption

Paul Caddy, managing knowledge lawyer at Lewis Silkin, tackles the human side of AI transformation with a solutions-focused lens. 

The chapter identifies the technical, commercial, and behavioural capabilities that professionals must develop, from AI literacy and prompt engineering to critical thinking, legal risk awareness, and adaptability. He argues that AI adoption is fundamentally a change management challenge rather than a technology one. Two insights stand out:

• fear is a genuine barrier to adoption, but Caddy shows firms how to defuse it. Headlines warning of an “AI jobs apocalypse” and hackneyed images of humanoid robots stoke anxiety that makes people resistant to change. Organisations should therefore keep training honest and free from hyperbole; tell human stories that let people feel both excited and cautious at once; and apply behavioural science, nudging adoption by making it easy, attractive, and timely, and by leading with benefits (“cut the time you take to do X”) rather than highlighting technical specifications.
• the AI literacy gap is real — 44 per cent of senior decision-makers report a shortage across the workforce — but Caddy sets out a concrete fix rather than dwelling on the deficit. He recommends role-specific, bite-sized training delivered in protected time and building fit-for-purpose programmes: Lewis Silkin’s own AI literacy eLearning product, developed with governance platform Holistic AI, is offered at two levels of technical depth and is designed to meet the EU AI Act’s AI literacy requirements.

Why this matters now

The legal profession sits at an inflection point. Intelligence is becoming a commodity; the scarcity value of many aspects of human expertise is eroding. Firms and in-house teams that treat AI as merely a technology procurement exercise – rather than a workforce, governance, and cultural challenge – risk expensive pilots that quietly wind down, or worse, regulatory exposure from ungoverned tool use.

Rising Roles in Law offers a practical roadmap for understanding this shifting professional landscape. It equips law firm leaders, innovation professionals, and in-house teams with the insight needed to design, develop, and lead the AI-enabled organisation of the future.