Generative AI and our opportunity for automation

With generative AI, much of the manual work that has long defined transactional practice — the painstaking synthesis of multi-jurisdictional rules, the assembly of first-cut structures, the cross-checking of regulatory constraints — will become readily automatable. For some, that prospect feels unsettling, raising questions about whether the lawyer’s role becomes less central. Our view is the opposite: this is an exceptionally promising moment for the profession, particularly in cross-border fund and investment structuring.
The highest-value use of this emerging automation stack is precisely to remove the heavily time-consuming, lower-payoff layers of the work so that transactional lawyers can devote their expertise to the creative, tailored, and strategically differentiated aspects of the mandate.

In the context of a system such as Sententia.ai, this shift is concrete. Instead of manually collating statutory texts, treaty provisions, and regulatory guidance across several jurisdictions, the platform’s legal-knowledge layer surfaces the relevant frameworks and flags constraints. Instead of building the initial investment structure from a blank page, the model generates coherent, multi-entity options complete with shareholding mechanics, governance rights, and compliance checkpoints. Instead of a first-pass issues list assembled by hand, the system produces a structured risk and regulatory matrix.

What remains, and what becomes more valuable, is the lawyer’s judgment: refining the commercial terms, introducing novel structuring solutions, stress-testing the model’s output against the client’s specific risk appetite, and applying the mandatory human-in-the-loop review that turns an AI-assisted draft into an advice a firm can stand behind.

In short, the technology does not diminish the transactional lawyer; it elevates the work from repetitive synthesis to higher-order design, strategy, and client-specific innovation.

For the junior lawyers coming up the ranks, the advent of gen AI allows for automating repetitive, non-substantive tasks and leaves room for substantive learning sooner, empowering junior lawyers to dig into the substance of the law early on and put it all in context. They can learn by application and design, rather than learning nuggets of the trade in bite-size, fragmented pieces and then doing the hard work of putting it all together only at the more senior levels of practice.

The Value we bring as lawyers is captured in our expertise, judgement, and ability to advise clients in a thoughtful, creative and accessible way.