The Structural Shift: Coming soon

Coming soon from Korum:

For years, the legal industry's conversation about artificial intelligence has focused on productivity. Lawyers would draft faster. Research would become more efficient. Contract review would require fewer hours. Law firms, in-house teams and legal service providers would all benefit from doing more with less.

That story is real, but it is incomplete.

The more important question is not whether AI makes legal work faster. It is what happens to the structure of legal services when legal work becomes easier to produce, easier to standardise, and easier to operationalise.

History suggests that when technology materially lowers production costs, industries do not simply become more efficient. They reorganise. Work moves. Value shifts. New forms of specialisation emerge.

Our next Whitepaper proposes that legal services are now entering that phase. The evidence emerging across 2025 and 2026 suggests that AI is not merely increasing lawyer productivity. It is changing how legal work is sourced, delivered and governed. As a result, legal work is beginning to migrate across provider categories.

The key development is not the replacement of lawyers. It is the emergence of a more specialised legal delivery architecture in which different participants perform different functions:

• In-house legal teams become orchestrators of delivery rather than purchasers of legal services alone.
• Legal delivery organisations, including ALSPs, operationalise and scale legal processes.
• Technology companies provide the software, models and platforms that increasingly underpin legal work.
• Law firms provide complex judgment, advocacy and strategic advice.

This paper refers to this emerging model as the Legal Delivery Stack. The central hypothesis is straightforward:

AI is accelerating the separation of legal judgment, legal delivery and legal technology into distinct but interconnected layers. Organisations able to operationalise AI safely, consistently and at scale are likely to capture an increasing share of legal work.

That conclusion does not imply that ALSPs inevitably become the dominant winners. Several alternative outcomes remain plausible:

• The first is AI-enabled insourcing, where sophisticated legal departments increasingly retain work that was previously outsourced.
• The second is platform concentration, where a small number of technology providers become the primary operating environments through which legal work is performed.
• The third is market convergence, in which law firms, technology providers and legal delivery businesses increasingly combine capabilities into integrated service models.

All three developments can already be observed to varying degrees. The central question therefore is not whether AI will transform legal services, but where value accrues once AI becomes embedded into everyday legal delivery.

This paper examines the evidence, evaluates competing explanations and proposes a practical framework for understanding the next stage of legal market evolution.

Read the full Whitepaper below: