Corporate legal departments have moved past the experimentation phase with generative AI, and the tools now running in production are forcing general counsel to rethink how they govern autonomous systems. Agentic AI agents are reviewing contracts, monitoring regulatory changes and handling first-pass discovery at major law firms and corporate legal departments - and the question for GCs has shifted from whether to deploy to how to govern what is already running.
That shift is visible in three developments this week: legal departments are writing AI protections into vendor contracts, law firm AI provider Harvey expanded its agent-building tools, and new survey data shows adoption jumped from 44% to 87% in one year.
Contracting becomes the primary governance tool
Reece Clark, a shareholder in Polsinelli's technology transactions practice, argues in Law.com that agentic AI has fundamentally changed what general counsel are accountable for, comparing how GCs evaluated AI tools for risk and return in 2025 to how they now manage systems capable of making independent decisions without continuous human intervention.
Representative of the tools landing on GC desks is Microsoft's Legal Agent, which analyzes documents, drafts edits and reviews contracts. The autonomy creates new exposure, Clark argues: "legal noncompliance, third-party harms, and decisions made faster than any oversight loop can catch them."
The response, according to the article, has been to embed protections in the contract itself. AI addenda in vendor agreements have become the primary tool for protecting organizations from AI vendor overreach, covering acts and omissions, violations of law, and liability questions that arise when an autonomous system makes a consequential mistake. Contracting for those protections is now a core GC competency.
Harvey builds custom agents for law firms
Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg told Bloomberg that the company unveiled a tool allowing law firms to build custom AI agents tailored to their practice areas. The company is betting it can win the legal market by staying in its own lane, building domain expertise in legal workflows rather than expanding into adjacent professional services.
Harvey now serves more than 700 customers across 58 countries. It has been adopted by 70% of AmLaw 10 firms and nearly half of AmLaw 100 firms. Its platform covers contract analysis, due diligence, compliance monitoring and litigation support, with models trained on legal materials at a depth general-purpose models cannot replicate. The firm raised $200 million at an $11 billion valuation in March 2026, directing funds toward expanding its AI agents and growing legal engineering teams embedded with customers.
GC use of generative AI nearly doubled in a year
FTI Consulting and Relativity, based on a survey of 224 chief legal officers and interviews with 30 general counsel, reported that generative AI use in corporate legal departments rose to 87%, compared with 44% in 2025. Legal departments with a formalized technology roadmap reached 53%, more than double the 25% from the prior year.
The most common use cases are summarization at 83%, contract clause identification at 63%, and e-discovery and document review, contract drafting and first-pass review. David Horrigan, Discovery Counsel at Relativity, said GC use has risen from 20% in 2023 to 87% today, "marking the end of what he called the era of the Luddite Lawyer."
Why this matters for legal professionals
For lawyers and legal staff, the practical takeaway is that AI agents are not a future consideration. They are operating in production environments now, and the remaining question is who can manage them competently. That governance work includes understanding AI addendum language in vendor agreements, checking that AI-produced contract analysis meets quality standards and understanding how autonomy shifts liability in your practice. Teams with structured training and workflows - such as those in an AI Learning Path for Paralegals - will be better positioned to work alongside systems that review contracts and flag risks without waiting for human instruction.
The broader AI for Legal coverage at CompleteAI Training tracks these shifts as they unfold across corporate law departments and firms.
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