Beyond Core Expertise: Valeria Ivasikh on Responsible AI and the Future of Legal Practice

In the third feature of our Legal Innovators UK 6.0 interview series, we speak with Valeria Ivasikh, Legal Director at Goji, part of the Euroclear Group.

Valeria’s career spans private practice, in-house leadership, and legal tech, giving her a broad view of how the profession is changing. She highlights how private practice builds a culture of excellence in client service, how in-house roles demand business fluency and agility, and how technology creates the breathing room for lawyers to communicate more clearly and focus on higher-value work.

In this interview, Valeria reflects on the responsible adoption of AI, how lawyers’ roles are evolving in a hybrid world of people and technology, and why timeless skills like critical thinking, communication, and leadership remain essential for the next generation. Read the full conservation below.

You’ve worked across in-house, private practice, and legal tech. How have these diverse roles shaped your vision on the future of legal practice?

Truly, those are very different working environments, and they bring out a different lawyer in you. There’s a set of core legal skills, such as the knowledge of black-letter law, the ability to get to the crux of the issue through all the noise, presentation skills - but the pace, and the types of stakeholders you interact with, can vary dramatically.

When I look at my most inspiring peers, most of whom have had the benefit of a tenure in private practice in addition to in-house experience, I see how they can make their clients feel they are getting that white-glove service that law firms pride themselves on. Shamelessly borrowing from Danny Meyer of Shake Shack fame, I think of it as hospitality.

At the same time, the best of the lawyers I know have learned to be excellent communicators, who are able to switch gears from legalese to business-speak to everything in between, depending on the client’s needs and without compromising on accuracy. This is an essential skill for a lawyer to thrive in-house.

The way I see it, legal tech helps us be better at both hospitality and communication: it can free up some time so that we do not have to rush through the meeting agenda, and it can quickly strip a letter of advice of legal jargon, making it digestible by a layperson.

That said, I have also learned the importance of deploying legal tech responsibly: rush it and it can set you back by breaking trust in the technology itself and in your ability to champion its adoption.

What does responsible deployment of AI look like? Where should the legal profession set boundaries in areas like drafting, due diligence, or decision-making?

This is less of an issue with specialised legal tech tools, but I would expect most general-purpose AI - if not all - to come with training data consent enabled by default, meaning that the application would use my prompts to train its models. Last time I checked this was the case - perhaps, unsurprisingly - with ChatGPT and Perplexity, but none of the legal and compliance AI tools I use. Still, to prevent inadvertent disclosure of sensitive information, it is good practice to check, and if there is a risk that anyone within my organisation might use personal data or guarded commercial information in their prompts, I will make sure we change that default opt-in to opt-out, which is usually fairly straightforward.

Another core concern is around the quality of AI-generated content. We cannot overemphasise that the output of an AI model is only as good as the data on which the model has been trained. So, when using AI for decision-making or research, I do not expect it to solve complex legal conundrums: it’s usually more effective to break the problem into smaller fundamental questions that have easily verifiable answers, and having the AI get those for me.

And finally, speaking of verifying the answers, there has to be some form of quality assurance. I prefer it to be extra thorough during the initial rollout of an AI tool, to be replaced with sporadic spot-checks now and again as the uptake increases.

How do you see the role of a lawyer evolving in the next 5–10 years with the growing presence of AI co-pilots and automation?

It must be the case that, as the legal profession embraces AI tools, we will get things done faster without compromising on quality. It is exciting to think about all the things we can do with the time we will have freed up: I know that many peers would like to get more exposure to the business side of the companies they look after, and to initiate and participate in cross-team efforts around risk, governance, and beyond. In that sense, AI holds a lot of promise for those who cannot spare the time because they are weighed down by the workload of repetitive and time-consuming tasks, not all of which are intellectually challenging or exciting.

That said, it is not just tedious and boring tasks that we could be outsourcing. For example, we already know from research that AI is better than humans at persuasion, at making people change their views. If AI can move a conspiracist to abandon their theory, it can help to get a point across when dealing with tricky stakeholders, or ones with whom you have a personal conflict.

For these efficiency gains to happen soon, I think it is important that we deploy AI tactically. Some of us are still frantically looking around for AI tools we can use just because we feel like we should. Just so that we can stay relevant. That strikes me as a fundamentally unhelpful approach. The way I see it, ask not what AI can do for you, ask what you want to outsource to AI - and chances are, there is already a tool for that.

What skills do you think young lawyers need to develop now—not just to survive, but to thrive—in an AI-enhanced legal environment?

To start with an obvious one - and this applies to young and seasoned lawyers alike - we can always get better at prompting. Every time my LLM model of choice gets an upgrade, there are probably a few tweaks I can make to get to my answers sooner.

For the most part, though, I really don’t expect meaningful changes in terms of skills an aspiring lawyer needs to succeed. The other day I read a piece on mentoring and career progression of developers who use AI to write their code, and it rang very true to me. The piece zoomed in on young developers who get praise for delivering (AI-generated) code at breakneck speed - but fail to see the bigger picture, explain their choices, troubleshoot or adapt to changes in requirements. I do not see how things are any different in the legal field.

If I was starting on my career journey today, I would double down on what is already on the curriculum: really know the law, understand how it works and evolves, strive to become the subject-matter expert in your field (or, if that’s more like you, expand your awareness to be the best generalist you can be), master the technical skills - and learn to speak to non-lawyers compellingly and effectively.

In a hybrid world where people and algorithms work side by side, what does effective legal leadership look like for you?

It is seeing AI for what it is, and getting your time back, and using it with impact.

I find the whole AI-is-out-there-to-get-our-jobs narrative pretty damaging: the more we repeat it, the more likely we are to endow AI with superpowers it doesn’t possess. Powerful and life-changing as it can be, AI is just a tool - and just like any tool, it is there to make life easier for us. If we start by mapping our own professional painpoints, and then find the right AI tool to solve those while I grow as a leader, that’s a win in my book.

Time scarcity can be a huge barrier to effective leadership, be it thought leadership or managing a team. As the law evolves, there is always so much more to learn. And most of us did not learn people management skills in law school, so this is something we have to deliberately cultivate. But after a day of tedious repetitive work, no one is doing any deep reading, no one is joining any training or webinars.

Seeing how AI is already transforming our routines and freeing up our time, I am hopeful that we harness this opportunity to finally invest those gains in becoming the lawyers we set out to be, whatever it may look like for each of us.

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Join the Conversation

Valeria will bring these perspectives to In-House Day at Legal Innovators UK 6.0, where she joins the panel “From Talk to Transformation: AI and In-House Empowerment.” Together with other experts, she’ll explore whether GenAI has truly liberated in-house teams, enabling them to work with greater autonomy, efficiency, and strategic influence.

Be part of the discussion this November in London, where leaders from across the legal ecosystem will share practical insights and forward-looking strategies.

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