KPMG says legal teams are becoming strategic leaders amid AI shift

KPMG’s 2026 Global General Counsel Outlook, based on a survey of 468 general counsel and senior legal leaders across 28 jurisdictions, says the job is moving from gatekeeper to strategic leader. The report says the general counsel role is entering “a new phase of transformation,” and that legal is becoming “a core capability” helping enterprises navigate complexity and make better strategic decisions.

That shift matters inside KPMG because it changes what clients expect from legal, compliance, risk, tax and advisory teams working together. The report points to growing demand for legal operations help, including managing legal spend, automating repetitive work, improving matter visibility and using data to make services more efficient. In practical terms, that means KPMG practitioners are being pulled into operating-model conversations that used to sit inside a single legal department and now touch finance, procurement, governance and transformation work at the same time.

The pressure is sharper around AI. KPMG says general counsel are increasingly being asked to guide AI governance, privacy, third-party risk and cyber resilience, which puts legal teams closer to the decisions shaping technology adoption across the enterprise. KPMG’s legal insights material says multiple forces, from geopolitical change to business model evolution to increasing department digitization through innovative technologies and artificial intelligence, are affecting the legal function. The firm says the differentiator in AI adoption is not simply deploying new tools, but integrating data, technology, people and processes to create a smarter, more proactive legal function that delivers greater business value.

That framing also changes how KPMG people need to talk to clients. As GCs show up more often in board-level discussions, legal teams are being judged less on how well they police risk and more on whether they help the business move. The strongest client conversations will connect faster legal review to revenue timing, stronger governance to brand trust and better data management to lower exposure. For tax and audit professionals, the expanding GC mandate creates more overlap with internal controls, risk management and the systems that support them.

A May 8 KPMG social post underscored how quickly AI is moving into day-to-day legal work. It pointed to an Association of Corporate Counsel and Everlaw survey showing 52% of in-house teams now use AI tools, while only 7% have seen cost reductions. That gap helps explain why KPMG is treating legal transformation as an operating challenge, not a theory. It is also why legal, compliance, risk and advisory teams are increasingly being asked to work as one client-facing system, not separate specialties.