Richard Susskind on AI and the future of legal services

Linklaters hosted Professor Richard Susskind CBE KC (Hon) at its London headquarters for a discussion on how artificial intelligence is reshaping the legal profession.

In conversation with firmwide managing partner Paul Lewis OBE, Professor Susskind, a leading thinker on law, technology and AI  set out both the scale of opportunity and challenge ahead. “This is both an exciting and a threatening technology,” he said, describing AI as something the profession should approach with “both optimism and caution.”

A central theme of the discussion was the pace of change. Professor Susskind highlighted growing momentum behind advanced AI, noting that systems may eventually “match or exceed human performance” across a wide range of tasks. “You don’t have to believe it,” he added, “but you should at least be planning for it.”

He challenged the profession to look beyond incremental gains in efficiency. “The real excitement of AI is not just to optimise what we already do,” he said, but to “solve legal problems in ways we couldn’t in the past.” This includes a shift towards more preventative, data-driven approaches that identify risks earlier and embed compliance into systems. As he put it, “we don’t really have the tools to keep people out of trouble today… we help resolve problems once they’ve arisen.”

While the forces transforming legal services may be technological, he emphasised that shaping that future remains a human responsibility, particularly through regulation and governance.
“We are not contributing enough to the policy-making discussion,” he warned, calling for greater engagement from the legal community.

Paul Lewis shared how Linklaters is already working with clients to explore how AI can reshape the way legal challenges are approached and solved in practice. Alongside colleagues from the firm’s Applied Intelligence practice, he highlighted the development of bespoke tools to help clients extract insights from complex datasets and support more informed decision-making.

The discussion underlined that AI in legal services is not simply a technological development, but a catalyst for transformation across legal services.