A Peer Conversation in London

At LegalTechTalk 2026, Europe's annual festival for legal transformation, Vesence hosted a lunch roundtable titled From Drafter to Director: The Lawyer's Shift to Reviewing Agentic Work. Led by Ludvig Swanström, the session brought together partners and innovation leaders for a candid discussion about what comes next as agents move beyond chat and into real legal work.

The Shift We Explored

Coding agents mark the next phase of AI in legal: not chatbots, but systems that pull information from Outlook, mark up PDFs, work across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and complete multi-step tasks end to end. As that capability matures, the lawyer's role is changing shape. Drafting and knowledge ownership are giving way to a new core skill: reviewing, accepting, rejecting, and directing the output of agents working in parallel.

The roundtable asked what happens when one lawyer is managing ten, twenty, or fifty agents at once. What does the review interface look like? Where does professional judgment sit when tracked changes scale across every document type a firm touches? And what does it mean for partners when the holder of legal knowledge becomes the custodian of the process?

Key Themes

• How the lawyer's identity is shifting from owner of legal knowledge to reviewer and project manager of agentic work, and what that means for partner roles, training, and career paths.
• What the future review interface looks like when agents act across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and PDFs, and where tracked changes, accept/reject workflows, and human judgment fit in.
• How firms can prepare for an operating model where a single lawyer orchestrates dozens of agents at once, including the practice areas, workflows, and quality controls that need to evolve first.

Part of LegalTechTalk 2026

The session was part of LegalTechTalk 2026, held 17–18 June at InterContinental London – The O2. The event brought together more than 5,500 attendees from 75+ countries and over 400 industry speakers across two days of panels, roundtables, and networking.

We were grateful to everyone who joined the conversation. If you were there, we'd love to hear what resonated. If you missed it, reach out: we're continuing the discussion with firms preparing for this shift.