You know a technology is mainstream when it takes over an entire industry conference. Of the 104 sessions at Legalweek New York, 87 featured AI. That's 84% of the agenda focused on a topic that’s not exclusive to the practice of law. It makes you wonder if Legalweek 1996 was dominated by email.
Information governance professionals can take comfort that more than a quarter of those AI sessions addressed data security and governance. As law firms adopt AI with a paradoxical blend of eagerness and caution, IG's moment is (finally!) here. Who else is better positioned to ensure Big Law's data is AI-ready and strictly governed? AI cannot govern itself to firms' and clients' exacting risk standards. So no, AI isn't coming for information governance jobs. But it is making them significantly harder.
Work on Top of Work
IG teams are already stretched. They're years into tackling petabyte-sized legacy data mountains with manual processes, navigating cloud migrations, managing pressure to cut storage costs by deleting data, and drowning in surging matter mobility requests. That's more than enough for most teams. Now add AI governance: the urgent need to curate, manage, and monitor AI-ready content that drives efficiency without introducing risk. IG’s portfolio of work just exploded and it’s only getting bigger.
Lifecycle Matter Management Now Has an Afterlife
The matter intake-to-disposition data lifecycle has a new chapter. Matter data that once lived exclusively in the DMS is now getting uploaded into AI platforms, as much as 10,000 documents at a time. This activity creates a data afterlife: content reincarnated into an ever-expanding universe of AI-generated output. Establishing governance frameworks, data guardrails, and ongoing monitoring for AI-accessed data adds an entirely new dimension to matter management. That’s a whole new layer of matter lifecycle work that didn’t exist four years ago. At this pace it’s likely AI will create data faster than it can be governed, both inside AI tools and across the firm.
More Work, Same Headcount
Although IG’s workload is growing, don't expect relief from hiring more people. Analysts covering Legalweek conjured two AI-driven futures for Big Law: one with fewer junior associates as AI absorbs their work, and another with the end of billable hours and the return of flat-fee “services rendered” billing. Both scenarios are driven by the same force: clients pressuring firms to adopt AI and lower fees. For back-office functions, both futures mean doing more with less as firms inevitably look to cost control to boost profitability. For IG teams specifically, that translates to managing a growing data estate at scale, cutting risk, and reducing costs, while maximizing existing team capacity.
Get Your Data House in Order Once and For All
If Legalweek 2026 is an accurate preview, firms must push forward to adopt AI, govern it, and deliver greater value to clients. That means IG teams need to move faster than ever, starting with the problem they've been circling for years: legacy data.
The more data you have, the more work there is for IG to do. Putting more people on the problem isn’t realistic. Firms want to cut costs and cleaning up legacy data manually requires more people and time than they can afford. The firms making progress in scaling the mountains of legacy data are the ones investing in technology, not more headcount. Specifically, tools that analyze and classify unstructured data at scale everywhere it lives and help people make decisions on what to do with it. Armed with the right technology, IG teams can see and manage everything from the 1996 emails to today's AI-generated contract drafts, faster and without more staff.
If the decades-long push to make the DMS the center of the matter record universe taught us anything, it's that data will always live outside the places it's supposed to be managed. The risk management play is to assume AI will access everything, because it probably will. For IG teams it means aspiring for AI-ready data everywhere, not exclusively within a carefully curated library. To get there, they’ll need the tools and workflows to address yesterday’s data once and for all and govern tomorrow’s data with automated processes. Now’s the time to take this work on before the unstructured data problem gets even bigger.
Teams taking the “make all data AI-ready” stance will add undeniable value to their firms by reducing AI risk and improving data quality, while also achieving IG’s other priorities for managing data to policy. Let’s take a page from the timekeepers and let technology do some of the lifting for IG. Imagine a future where some of your most arduous, routine unstructured data governance tasks are automated. Now there’s a session I’d like to see at Legalweek 2027.