Joy Sherrod: AI Won’t Replace Lawyers - Only Low-Value Legal Work
- cosmonauts
- May 19
- 4 min read
As the overlap between legal and technology continues to expand, new questions are emerging. Will the next generation of in-house counsel need to become technology experts first and lawyers second? Or, more radically, will AI replace lawyers altogether?
Ahead of Legal Innovators California 2026, we spoke with Joy Sherrod, Director of Discovery and Associate General Counsel at Intel Corporation, who has spent years driving technological advancement across legal departments in San Francisco.
In the interview, Joy affirmed that AI will replace low-value work, not lawyers. However, resistance to AI adoption still exists internally. Joy suggested overcoming this by understanding the real pain points legal teams face and identifying technologies that can genuinely help.
Joy will explore these ideas further during the “Automating Away the Pain” panel on In-House Day, focusing on better workflow design and removing friction from in-house legal work.
Until then, you can explore Joy’s insights below.
There is a growing debate about whether the next generation of in-house lawyers needs to be technologists first and lawyers second. Where do you stand on that, and how is it shaping how you recruit and develop talent?
I actually don’t agree with this, companies hire in-house attorneys for their specialized knowledge and ability to advise on a large number of various issues. The kinds of things that AI is best at in the legal profession – research, summarization, data analysis, etc are much more valuable for law firm attorneys and in particular more junior attorneys. That said, it is critically important that in-house attorneys expand their knowledge of technology and become conversant in the use of AI tools. We have to become more efficient and spend less time on lower value work, technology is the only way to get there. In recruiting and developing talent our goal is always to recruit the best lawyers, but now we also want to see a person who can leverage technology in their work. We have a robust training program aimed at getting all of our attorneys to become comfortable with AI and to incorporate it into their work.
If you had to predict which part of the traditional in-house legal function will be unrecognisable in ten years, what would it be and why?
Contract drafting and development will largely be automated I believe, only the biggest/most important agreements will be heavily negotiated by attorneys. Patent analysis will likely become much faster, the acquisition of patent portfolios will probably become more common and better targeted.
There is a school of thought that says AI will not replace lawyers but will expose the lawyers who were never adding much value to begin with. Do you think that is a fair framing, and what does it mean for how legal departments are structured?
I think it’s more likely that AI will expose legal work that isn’t adding much value as opposed to actual lawyers. In the past, a lot of time was spend doing the same thing over and over; for example answering the same basic questions over and over or drafting agreements with the same terms, etc. Now whether the attorneys who spend most of their time doing these types of tasks become obsolete? If they can’t uplevel the kind of work they are doing, yes; but if they can shift to more high-value work then no.
Many innovation initiatives fail not because of technology, but because of internal resistance: how have you navigated scepticism within your legal team when introducing new tools or ways of working?
The best approach is to understand what the groups’ pain points are and what technology can really help them, don’t introduce a new tool for the sake just of the sake of it – many projects fail because they are filling a need that doesn’t exist. People don’t want to spend time learning to work with technology that doesn’t help them. You also have to get stakeholder buy in early when introducing new tools, especially at the executive level.
As global regulation becomes more complex and fragmented, do you foresee a shift toward greater international harmonisation of laws or increasing divergence, and what would that mean for multinational organisations?
Definitely more divergence. The EU and UK will continue to focus on privacy and the ethics of AI, I expect will put in place more controls as the technology becomes more powerful and ubiquitous. Latin America and Asia will likely follow this route as well. The US will continue to be the wild west, so far fewer restrictions which is both good and bad. Multi-national corporations are not going to be able to have a one-size-fits-all approach to AI use/governance, they will need experts in various locations to put in place policies and protocols specific to the region in question.
Based on Joy’s insights, one thing became clear: the future of legal work is not a battle between lawyers and AI, but a question of how legal functions create the most value.
The firms moving forward fastest are treating AI as a way to clear the runway from repetitive, low-leverage work, giving legal teams more space for strategy, nuance, and the conversations that actually move matters forward.
At the same time, hesitation around AI still runs deep, and the real obstacle often has less to do with the technology itself than the habits, workflows, and internal friction surrounding it. Finding the right solution starts with identifying the right problem first.
We’ll be unpacking more of these conversations this June, along with the perspectives shaping what’s next for legal innovation.
Comments