European in-house legal teams use AI to do more work internally

In short: More company legal teams in Europe are using AI to speed up routine work, build internal tools, and rely less on outside law firms for everyday tasks.

What's going on

A growing number of in-house legal teams, meaning the lawyers who work inside a company, are using AI to change how they work, according to the Financial Times Innovative Lawyers Europe 2026 report.

At Prosus, a tech investment company, leaders asked employees across the business to build “AI agents”, which are small tools that can carry out specific tasks (like a digital helper for one job). Prosus said it developed more than 60,000 agents, and its legal team built 298 of them. Some senior lawyers used “vibe coding”, which means telling an AI tool what you want in plain language so it can help write software code.

At Spanish energy group Repsol, the whole legal team has been trained in programming and AI. Repsol says it saved more than 22,000 hours in the past year and reduced spending on outside lawyers, including more than €360,000 on a single matter.

Other companies are changing how they buy legal services. Revolut, a UK fintech, replaced its fixed list of preferred law firms with a quarterly system that uses the company’s own data on speed, quality, and cost to suggest which firm to hire. Revolut also scores firms on how they use AI and asks for more transparency.

What to watch

As legal teams build more tools in-house, outside law firms may get fewer routine tasks and more specialist work. A key issue will be trust and checks, since AI can make mistakes, especially with legal details. Companies will also watch whether time savings translate into better advice, not just faster answers.

Source: Financial Times