Microsoft’s EMEA legal chief: AI fluency is now the baseline for external counsel

AI is no longer a differentiator for law firms hoping to win work from Microsoft.

Speaking on The Non-Billable Podcast, Rebecca Anderson, Microsoft's head of legal for EMEA, says the technology giant now expects all of its external advisers to arrive "using and being fluent in AI", with the focus shifting from whether firms have adopted the technology to how strategically they use it.

“AI fluency is really the baseline,” Anderson says. “We expect all of our outside counsel to come to a project or a piece of work with Microsoft using AI and being fluent in AI.”

Simply buying an AI platform is not enough. “We want our outside counsel to help us scale, help us build the knowledge pools and the curated data for agents to operate from,” she says.

Just as importantly, Anderson says Microsoft wants firms that are preparing for a very different legal profession.

“We want to work with outside counsel that are building the next generation of lawyers and investing in the new skills that lawyers need.”

Microsoft's internal overhaul

The demands Microsoft is placing on external counsel in part mirror changes inside its own legal department. Anderson leads a team of 40 lawyers across EMEA, supporting Microsoft's enterprise cloud and AI business.

Last year, the company reorganised its legal team after concluding that the challenge was not actually about technology but its own internal operating model.

“Our knowledge was fragmented, it was stuck in people's inboxes, in different tools,” she says. “We were doing a lot of repeat work and not getting the most value out of our senior legal resources.”

The result has been what Anderson describes as a move from “legal as a service model to legal as a platform”.

Microsoft has introduced an AI-enabled “frontline” for legal requests, using AI to triage requests from thousands of internal business users. It has also built AI agents that help lawyers manage escalations, and has been using its Word-based contract drafting agent, which launched to much fanfare earlier this year.

The result, Anderson says, has been to free lawyers from repetitive work and allow them to focus on more strategic issues for the business.

Looking further ahead, Anderson believes AI will change the nature of legal careers rather than reduce demand for lawyers.

“We're reimagining the industry right now,” she says. “I think we're going to see an emergence of new types of lawyers - legal design thinkers, legal knowledge engineers, legal process analysts.”

Listen to the full conversation with Rebecca Anderson on The Non-Billable Podcast.