Leading through uncertainty: the human side of change

Leading through uncertainty:
the human side of change 

The hardest part of transformation is rarely the technology. It's what change asks of people, and whether leaders can hold their teams steady while the ground keeps moving.

By Janet Taylor-Hall (CEO, Cognia Law), Claire Chapman (Co-founder & Director Albi Consulting, NED, former General Counsel and Chief People Officer) and Matthew Layton (NED, former Managing Partner, Clifford Chance) 

This article covers: 

• What’s at stake for the legal profession in the age of AI
• How leaders create a degree of certainty when little feels certain
• Why this may be one of the better moments to be a lawyer

Most of the conversation about artificial intelligence (AI) in law is framed as a skills problem. Teams need new tools, new training, a bit of room to experiment. Granted, all of that's true, yet none of it explains why so little actually moves. 

Between the three of us, we've watched this stuttering evolution from most of the angles available: from inside an in-house team, from the top of a law firm, and from the business of rebuilding how legal work is done. The pattern is consistent. What slows change is rarely a shortage of capability. It's something closer to identity. 

When expertise stops being the moat 

Let's be clear about one thing first: unease about AI is not unique to law. Something similar is unsettling accountants, doctors, consultants and plenty of others, so this isn't a story about lawyers being uniquely fearful. But law does have something particular at stake. For a long time, the profession has made expertise – deep, scarce, hard-won – the cornerstone of its own importance. The fees, the status and the seniority have all rested on knowing things that others do not. That is precisely the cornerstone AI erodes.  

When a machine can produce a competent first draft or surface the right precedent in seconds, the scarcity that underpinned a lawyer's value looks less secure. The discomfort that follows isn't luddism. It's a reasonable response to watching the ground on which your worth was built begin to shift. 

It runs deeper than skills. One of us has spent a decent chunk of their career telling partners that their time at the firm is coming to an end. What you learn in those conversations is that it's never only about a job. Ask a lawyer who they are and the answer, more often than not, is "I'm a lawyer" before "parent" or anything else. When the expertise that defined you can be commoditised, the unsettledness isn't really about workflow. It's about identity. 

That’s why "you'll need to upskill" so often falls flat. It answers a question nobody's really asking. And here is the trap for leaders: when you read someone's resistance as a character flaw, that they're being stubborn or won't get with the programme, it hardens. The person digs in, and their discomfort re-emerges as a set of rational-sounding objections: the tool isn't accurate enough, the regulator won't accept it, the work is too complex. Read the same resistance as what it usually is, a response to a threat to identity, and it becomes something you can actually work with, because you're addressing the real cause rather than arguing with its symptoms. 

Creating certainty when there isn't any 

So the more useful question isn't how do we make people learn faster. It's how do we create enough certainty for people to change at all. Uncertainty is difficult for anyone. Faced with it, most of us grow anxious and pull back toward what we know. The leader's task, then, is to build enough psychological safety around a team that they can try something, get it wrong, and still feel secure. That's not softness. It's the precondition for any of the harder work that follows. 

There's an example that fits the moment. When Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton's ship was crushed in the ice, his goal stopped being to cross the continent and became, overnight, to ensure every one of his people reached home alive. He changed the north star without losing the crew. That's the skill this period asks of legal leaders: not to have the map, which nobody possesses, but to change direction with enough conviction to persuade people to follow. 

General counsel carry this challenge twice over. They are increasingly asked to be the steady hand for the wider business, the ones who make a nervous board feel that risk is understood and held, at the very moment their own certainties have been taken away. You can't easily be someone else's safety net while the floor is moving under you. Acknowledging that openly, rather than performing a confidence you don't feel, tends to earn more trust. 

A thrilling time to be a lawyer 

None of this is cause for gloom. This may, in fact, be one of the best and most exciting times to be a lawyer, but only if you can see where value goes when scarce expertise stops being the thing that sets you apart. It doesn't disappear. It moves. 

It moves to the judgement that sits on top of the machine's output. AI is very good at giving you the answer that is usually right; it works on probability. A lawyer's value is increasingly in the moment when usually-right is exactly wrong: the one contract in the stack with a clause that doesn't belong, the situation where the safe reading would sink the deal, the call that turns on knowing this client, this board, this risk appetite, right now. The machine can tell you what typically happens. It can't tell you what this particular client, in this particular moment, should do. That is not a lesser role than the one AI is taking over. It is the more valuable one, and it is the one lawyers were always best at. 

The qualities that carry you there – curiosity, a genuine appetite to learn, integrity, empathy, self-awareness – are ones this profession already selects for. Put simply: AI works on probability; people see possibility. The task is to stop defending the ground the machine has taken and move deliberately onto the ground it can't. 

Part of leading through this is humility, including the willingness to accept that a younger, more fluent colleague may simply be right where you are wrong. That's not a comfortable admission in a profession organised around seniority, but a liberating one. It turns the hierarchy from something to defend into something to learn from. 

At Cognia, we've found it helps to give the change a name people can move towards rather than away from. When someone joins us as a lawyer and, over time, becomes what we call a legal engineer – someone who brings legal judgement together with the design and technical skills to build better ways of working – it's not a demotion of what they were. It's an evolution of it. The identity not only survives the transition but grows from it. 

Because, ultimately, the thing a good lawyer sells has never really been the document, or even the knowledge behind it. It's assurance: the grounded confidence that a decision will hold up when it is tested. That's not going anywhere. If anything, in a world awash with plausible machine-generated answers, it becomes more valuable, not less. Holding onto that isn't clinging to the past. It's keeping the part of the identity that was always worth keeping.