AI and the digital age: implications for the legal profession
Chiara Caliandro
Studio Legale De Berti Jacchia, Milan
This was the topic of the opening panel of the symposium jointly organised by the Rome Bar and the International Bar Association’s Committees for Law Firm Management, Senior and Young Lawyers. The conversation was designed to take stock, in very concrete terms, of how artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the daily work of law firms, how the profession is responding to questions of responsibility and risk, and where the practice of law is heading over the next five years.
The opening panel was moderated by Irene Scalzo of Chiomenti (Rome) and brought together Manuela Cavallo of Portolano Cavallo (Rome), together with two voices from the tech industry side: Mauro Corselli of Lexroom and Alessandro Pesa of Saga. The intention of the Co-Chairs, Gianmatteo Nunziante of Nunziante Magrone (Rome) and Chiara Caliandro of De Berti Jacchia (Milan), was to put law firms and legal-tech providers in the same room and to test, in real time, how aligned (or not) their respective perspectives really are.
The discussion opened with a very practical question: which tasks are already being assisted by AI in law firms and what is actually working as opposed to what has fallen short of expectations? The exchange quickly moved beyond the list of use cases (legal research, drafting, due diligence and contract review) to a more fundamental question raised by the moderator, namely are AI tools still primarily serving efficiency or are they beginning to transform the legal business model itself?
Cavallo has significant experience in new technologies applied to law firms and internal processes:
‘From the perspective of a managing partner, investing in AI is no longer a question of experimentation but of strategic positioning. We are moving beyond isolated efficiency gains and into a phase where technology directly shapes how legal services are structured, delivered and priced. This requires not only financial investment, but also a strong governance framework, clear accountability on outputs, and a conscious effort to preserve the core of our professional judgment. In our view, the real challenge is not adopting AI, but integrating it in a way that enhances quality, protects client confidentiality and, at the same time, continues to train the next generation of lawyers to think critically, not just to prompt effectively.’
Corselli built on the generational dimension Cavallo had raised:
‘The professional relationship between the seasoned partner and the tech savvy associate has evolved from a traditional apprenticeship into a symbiotic partnership where both parties are simultaneously mentors and mentees. It becomes evident that the future of law rests upon a reciprocal exchange of wisdom and technological agility.’
He then placed that observation within a broader strategic framework:
‘The modernisation of legal practice is no longer a peripheral concern; it is a central strategy to safeguard the rule of law while embracing the efficiencies of the fourth industrial revolution. To me, what is needed is to shift from phase one, which is AI seen as an efficiency tool (doing things better), to phase two, which is AI as a business model transformer (doing better things). AI changes the very nature of legal delivery and how it is sold. We might no longer be selling time, but results or access.’
That last observation, namely that the profession may no longer be selling time but rather results or access, opened up the second topic of the panel, focused on professional responsibility, quality control and risk in the use of AI. Who supervises the AI output; who takes responsibility for it; what internal protocols and governance policies are firms putting in place; and how are providers building their offering around reliability, traceability of sources and the well-known issue of hallucinations?
Pesa addressed the point from the provider side, but in a way that put the human dimension at the centre:
‘The democratisation of AI is only a positive thing. Service delivery is going to change, and it is not bad, it means you need to start to think that if everybody has access to AI, the human part becomes more important. On the other hand, what senior lawyers should not miss is still teaching juniors why they are doing legal work, what it means if they do things this way or another and to make sure that the use of AI will not be an over use because if we put only AI superpowers in assisting processes, we risk breaking the boundaries of the rule of law.’
He also stressed a point that resonated strongly with the audience, namely the importance, for any law firm, of being able to protect its confidential information, which in his view means engaging with a service ‘where all the material that is being used is self-contained, separate from the internet’.
The closing part of the panel was devoted to the forward-looking question: what competence will be most valuable for a lawyer in 2030, the traditional legal one, the technological one or something altogether new, and where are tech companies investing today (autonomous agents, multimodal AI or integration with the courts)? It was on this point that the moderator, Scalzo, shared what was perhaps the most honest reflection of the entire panel:
‘One of the open questions I find most challenging, and one I honestly don’t have an answer to yet, is how we will bridge the gap between the generation of young lawyers and the senior professionals who drive strategic decision-making and deliver high-level counsel to clients. If a significant portion of the traditional training ground, the hands on, formative experience that junior lawyers have historically relied upon to develop judgement, is progressively replaced by prompting and generative AI workflows, how will we cultivate the next generation of trusted advisors and decision-makers? This is a genuine concern, and I think it would be intellectually dishonest to pretend we have a clear solution at this stage.’
The point landed, and in many ways, it set the agenda for the second panel of the day, which examined precisely how junior and senior lawyers can cooperate in the current digital era. The risk of polarisation of the profession, between large firms able to adopt AI at scale and smaller firms left behind, and the related question of whether we are heading towards a standardisation of standards or towards new barriers to entry, was left as an open issue for the audience, together with the equally open question, raised in the Q&A, of whether AI may end up reshaping the legal market by accelerating the internalisation of certain activities within clients’ in-house functions.