General counsel (GC) must guide their organizations through complexity and uncertainty, while equipping leaders with the understanding and confidence to invest in and execute on strategy. In 2026, GC will shoulder the primary responsibility for managing three distinct forms of uncertainty and complexity.
Use the following insights to set your vision and functional objectives for the year ahead.
GC must create board processes and information flows that match today’s speed of disruption and change.
Only 35% of boards effectively hold executives accountable and oversee strategy and risk.
The demands on board oversight are increasing in an AI-driven world, with rapid change, persistent shocks and legal uncertainty.
The process of board oversight hasn’t undergone significant change in decades and should be rethought.
Board effectiveness is based on director quality, director social dynamics and board information access.
GC must take a leading role in encouraging the board to build a culture of psychological safety within the boardroom to ensure constructive pressure-testing of management.
GC must rethink the skills necessary for future directors and seek out “systems thinking” as a key director skill set (identifying directors that can synthesize diverse information and provide integrated, strategic guidance).
AI is poised to become an essential resource for directors, with its effective utilization constituting a critical aspect of the board’s duty of care. AI empowers boards to rapidly identify patterns and emerging threats within corporate data, generate scenarios to prepare for a range of potential futures and validate strategic decisions.
GC must recognize their role is changing and adapt how they provide support and what they focus on.
Macroeconomic, geopolitical and social volatility have put GC front and center. Still, not enough attention is given to increased value of legal assets or costs of internal complexity.
As business models change, so does the relative value of how the GC spends time and effort.
GC need a firmer basis for making decisions about their role orientation, prioritization and time management.
GC must proactively and strategically reprioritize their efforts in response to shifts in business or operating models. In doing so, GC can ensure legal assets, contractual terms and regulatory obligations are continuously optimized and serve as sources of strategic intelligence.
While GC value strategic alignment, legal quality and productivity, they underappreciate their contribution to decision complexity and its role in strategy execution gaps.
Organizational success requires achieving ROI from AI use. GC must support enterprise AI using rules, procurement processes and data governance systems that reduce barriers to ROI achievement, while protecting long-term assets.
AI-augmented workforces and operating models affect the sources of legal risk. The GC’s functional relationships, expertise and workflows must adjust in response.
Legal and regulatory uncertainty, coupled with increased business use of AI, increases the demand on legal. At the same time, enterprises have little willingness to hire new headcount. GC must figure out how to translate legal department AI investments into actual productivity growth.
Increased business demands require an increase in legal productivity.
Willingness to invest in headcount is waning, while pressure to demonstrate gains from AI investments is rising.
Legal can’t afford to become a source of drag in increasingly automated environments.
Unleashing the true potential of AI requires a redesign of the legal operating model.
Realizing GenAI benefits requires more than enthusiasm. Success depends on careful planning, targeted experimentation and building digital readiness across your department.
The highest-value uses for AI tools in legal are rooted in contract data extraction and document summarization, with further legal intelligence capabilities expected in the near future.
GC must foster a climate in which technology use among members of the legal team is reflexive. This requires an environment where technology is difficult to avoid, with expectations for GenAI use or experimentation, and consequences for not using it.
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