The legal area of the future is designed today: vision and decisions towards 2030

Five years ago, you were a legal manager in 2020. The social outbreak had just shaken Chile. The whole country wondered how it would affect the stability of companies. You were assessing what to do if they closed down premises, if the remote work was viable, which external studies you could activate as backup. Then, COVID arrived and among the uncertainty, something became clear: continuing to operate with physical documents, manual flows and informal processes was no longer sustainable. We had to digitize as much as possible. We had to anticipate. Virtual shareholders, digital signatures, remote work and teleworking standards, among many other changes, generated daily stress.

That moment marked a before and a after. But what then seemed to be a great advance, today it became a minimum standard So in 2025 the challenges of the legal area were multiplied and no longer resolved with more lawyers or more hours. We're forced to redesign. To change the approach.

According to a regional study by Lemontech and GL LATAM, 45% of legal management still does not have defined KPIs, which prevents the justification of investments in high management (Lemontech & GL LATAM, 2025). In other words, many of these teams have no data to prove their value to the business. The KPI is in no case the first priority of a legal team, not even the second, but if it is a clear sign that in its absence, everything that is built up may not exist. In fact, if we talk about strategy, we will first start talking about a clear mission, then we will go down to objectives, from there to the design of initiatives that will enable those objectives to be met and only in the end we are concerned about understanding how to measure achievements or deviations, that is, just there we are talking about KPI.

For many companies, the turning point has been to understand that the traditional legal model no longer scale with the speed of business. That it is not about adding more hours or resources, but about redesigning the operational architecture so that the legal function provides where the most value generates. It is no coincidence that 76% of the legal management in Latin America operates with teams of between 1 and 8 people, facing an operational overload without proportional resources (Lemontech & GL LATAM, 2025).

This is where alternative legal service providers (ALSP, for their English sign) have emerged. Firms that combine legal knowledge, technology, process management and flexible talent to help companies operate more integrated and efficient. They don't replace the legal team. They complement it. They release him. They make it. Especially in contexts such as Chilean, where only 24% of legal areas have adopted, for example, artificial intelligence tools, the lowest figure in the region (Lemontech & GL LATAM, 2025).

This model does not respond to a fashion. It responds to a structural need: to do more, more clearly, more traceability and more strategic focus. The organizations that have understood this are moving faster. Scaling what works and professionalizing legal function as any other critical unit of business.

Today, while some legal managers are redesigning their processes to align with increasingly demanding standards, others risk being left behind, continuing to operate with linear structures, data-free and metric decisions that do not talk to the general management, which can compromise the future relevance of the area. It's not a capacity problem. It is an opportunity for competitiveness.

2030 is just around the corner. And those who get ready will not only have optimized their processes. They will have transformed the place that occupies the legal area within the organization.

The transformation will not only be technical, but will be structural, functional and cultural. Imagine a legal team that no longer works on silos, but is connected to products, technology and operations. It designs strategies for the ethical and efficient use of data. That is anticipated to emerging regulations. It implements customizable contracts by type of service and legal engines that ensure customization without losing regulatory framework. An area that, for example, implements a strategic project to update and transform the contractual management of the company and, through it, accelerates the business, extracts data that contribute to improving or expanding business relations and enables the negotiation of better terms that directly impact the company's income line.

In a recent case, a global company managed to migrate 700,000 contracts in only six months using IA, with + 99% accuracy in metadata and a 65% reduction in manual work (Elevate, 2025). On the other hand, one of our strategic partners in Alster, Factor.lawhas managed to increase the speed of contractual cycles with application and integration of tools associated with process improvement along with technology by 82%. That is the scale of efficiency that is possible today and something that we promote from Alster as standard for our projects in Latin America

In addition to this new mindset, there are also new profiles and requirements of capabilities and competencies within the teams, including the case of Legal Engineers, Legal & Compliance Designers, Legal Project Managers, etc., and multidisciplinary teams that think legal as an enabling layer of the business, not as a restrictive filter. Among them, the role of the "Agent Manager" is also planned, persons responsible for coordinating multiple IA agents in daily legal tasks, integrating automation with professional criteria (Legal Operators, 2025).

Some companies are already going that way. They have outsourced processes that do not bring differentiation. They have redesigned internal flows to eliminate friction. They have integrated legal solutions with their business systems. And they did it without losing control. On the contrary: they have gained visibility, traceability and capacity to climb.

That's where we work today. From Alster, we accompany medium and large companies in Latin America that want to modernise their legal function, regardless of their starting point. We do it as an ALSP that combines legal talent, technology and operational design. Not to replace. But to activate what the internal team does not have time and should not have to do in an increasingly changing environment.

Some organizations started this change with a timely project. Others with a pilot. Several are moving towards more mature models. They all have something in common: they understood that legal cannot stay out of business transformation.

2030 is not far. But what defines distance is not the calendar. These are the decisions that are made today.

References:

• Elevate. (2025). Case Study: Contracts Insights - 700K Contracts Migrated in Six Months Using AI.
• Legal Operators. (2025, July 21). The Legal Ops Agent Manager. LegalOps Newsletter.
• Lemontech & GL LATAM. (2025). Challenges and Perspectives for Legal Management LATAM 2025.
• Morae Global Corporation. (2025). GenAI Readiness Checklist Whitepaper.