Leading with Humanity: The Future of Legal Leadership
- Cosmonauts Team
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
In the latest feature of our Legal Innovators UK 6.0 interview series, we speak with Lisa Ardley-Price, Managing Legal Counsel at NatWest, who brings over 15 years of experience across leading law firms and the banking sector.
An award-winning lawyer, inclusion advocate, and coach, Lisa has built her career championing diversity of thought and human-centred leadership. In this interview, she shares her perspective on how empathy, collaboration, and trust are becoming vital to innovation, and how legal leaders can empower their teams to thrive in the GenAI era.
Why is diversity of thought so essential in today’s era of innovation within the legal industry?
In an age of exponential change, businesses need to be able to think and innovate fast. The world we operate in is becoming increasingly complex and bringing in diverse perspectives can help surface different legal risks, commercial priorities, and cultural implications so solutions are more robust and creative. Diversity of thought reduces groupthink and blind spots, bringing in unique experiences and skillsets to not only create but experiment with and scale solutions. Ultimately this builds customer trust - diverse legal teams can think fast, collaborate across functions and come up with unique solutions tailored to meet their customer’s needs.
How can legal leaders communicate their team’s impact in a way that resonates with business stakeholders and boards?
Start by speaking the language of your stakeholder and understand what value looks like for them. Start with the outcomes and deliver it in a visually engaging and easily digestible format. Some stakeholders will be really focused on the data and metrics so it will be important to go in with some impactful data examples but couple this with some meaningful storytelling that will demonstrate tangible value. You cannot measure a legal team’s impact by numbers alone, much of a lawyer's impact will not just be the technical advice they gave or costs they saved but how they communicated, empathised and supported their customer through a transaction, project or crisis. Being able to also analyse and interrogate the data and identify ways to better capture meaningful metrics will also demonstrate not just a deeper level of data literacy but strategic leadership. Finally, be bold and don’t wait to be invited to present the impact but also celebrate it in the moment so it’s relevant and current.
What strategies do you use as a legal leader to prevent burnout in your team? Can AI help or create pressures?
Put your people first; nurturing an engaged and motivated team will ensure sustainable high performance. Leaders should be observant about work patterns and behaviours and ask incisive questions that will identify an individual’s needs in the moment; including drivers, goals and required resources. Invest time in creating a culture where individuals feel empowered to speak up for what they need, have autonomy in their work, can shape their roles and are recognised for the value they are bringing. AI tools and processes remove some of the administrative tasks from our desks, enabling each of us to apply our skills to more strategically important and meaningful work which boosts wellbeing and engagement and also gives leaders more time to invest in coaching and developing their teams. However, change can be unsettling and adapting to new ways of working can take time so be sensitive to the fact that some colleagues will be further along the journey than others. You can support colleagues by focussing on incremental changes over radical transformation to make it less overwhelming and encouraging a culture of peer coaching, collaboration, knowledge sharing and experiential learning like gigs and work swaps.
What risks do you see if lawyers overly rely on AI for drafting and analysis?
Whilst the technology is developing at a rapid pace, there are still hidden errors and hallucinations. Models can produce plausible but incorrect citations or interpretations risking credibility and material legal error. Human oversight is still required to ensure that we are not only delivering technically accurate advice but it is tailored to the customer’s circumstances and needs and free from assumptions and bias. AI will not necessarily understand the wider context in the same way a human will with years of experience and relationships. It’s our experience that also enables us to develop our legal and commercial intuition and over-reliance on AI can erode good judgment and ultimately damage trust by exposing businesses and customers to harm rather than protecting them. Good decisions are made when we understand them properly and so we must guard against surrendering decision-making to AI and where automating, ensure appropriate escalation processes including manual interventions are built in.
Looking ahead 10 years — how do you envision the legal profession evolving amid rapid technological advancement?
It’s impossible to predict what the world will be like in 10 years. However, the way I see our profession evolving is lawyers becoming much more generalist and multi-faceted, not just in terms of technical legal specialism but also leaning into other areas of their business; becoming forecasters, strategists and designers. A legal team won’t just be made up of legal experts but also technologists, data scientists and product specialists. This will also enable legal teams to become even more outcome focussed, setting KPIs and OKRs that align to the business goals. Lawyers will be thinking more like business owners, developing new ways of delivering their services in the most effective and impactful way that will support their business to stay ahead of the curve and even anticipate it, rather than reacting to it. They will also play a fundamental role in ethical decision-making and ensuring that technological change is implemented with appropriate guardrails. Trust will remain at the core of the profession and will remain rooted in humanity. Technology will augment a lawyers’ credibility and reliability but the human elements of trust - understanding, communication, connection and empathy - will still determine long-term relationships and value.
Join the Conversation
As technology continues to accelerate change, Lisa reminds us that true innovation begins with people.
Diverse perspectives, inclusive leadership, and trust remain the pillars of progress, even in an AI-driven world.
Join Lisa on Day 2 of Legal Innovators UK as she delivers the keynote, “Proving Value in the GenAI Era.” She’ll explore how the profession can measure impact, maintain resilience, and collaborate across generations to create meaningful, ethical, and human-centred innovation.