Why experience still wins at the negotiations
AI is changing everything and the legal profession is no exception.
Whether you see it as a disrupter, a danger, or an unbound opportunity, AI is reshaping the world we work in. For legal service providers, that means evolving or being left behind. At Flint, we’ve chosen to lean in, and what we’re seeing is interesting.
Law is there to be used
The most significant shift AI has produced is not in how lawyers work, it’s in how clients engage with the law. Every individual and business now has ready access to legal information that was once the exclusive domain of legal teams and outside counsel. Contracts are being drafted, reviewed, and negotiated by people who, not long ago, would never have picked one up.
We think that’s a good thing.
Law is not a concept that should live in books. It has a purpose in every area of society and commerce. For businesses, law facilitates enterprise, manages risk, and provides the structural framework for all commercial activity. It is meant to be actively used, not left in a contract repository and dusted off when a dispute arises.
Democratising legal knowledge is, on balance, unambiguously positive. The question is, what happens next?
What we’re seeing in practice
As our clients have gained access to legal information and AI-assisted tools, some clear patterns have emerged:
- Clients arrive better prepared;
- They have a clearer sense of the services they need and why;
- They understand the risks they face; and, importantly,
- They appreciate the complexity of legal drafting required to properly manage those risks.
That context makes our work highly targeted. We spend less time on orientation and more time on the problems that actually matter.
The AI redline problem
Here is where it gets interesting, and where we see businesses running into difficulty.
Large language models are designed to identify every potential issue, discrepancy, or risk scenario in a document. In the abstract, that sounds useful. In practice, it produces a problem: when every issue is flagged with equal urgency, nothing is prioritised.
A minor definition inconsistency gets the same weight as an uncapped liability provision. Boilerplate clauses that have been standard for twenty years attract the same redline as a clause that genuinely exposes your business to significant risk.
When that redlined document goes to a counterparty, their model does the same thing and a cycle begins. Synthetic legal arguments, generated by algorithms and exchanged between parties who may not fully understand them accumulate and circulate. The unresolved issues seem to expand, negotiations stall and operational time is lost.
In our experience, when lawyers are brought in to get a stalled negotiation back on track, there are often forty-plus live issues on the table. In reality, perhaps five of them are the ones worth worrying about. Getting the contract across the line becomes an expensive exercise.
Human judgment is still fundamental
Law’s purpose, ultimately, is to structure and govern relationships between people, and between the organisations those people build and run. An AI model might review a contract, but it will struggle when a negotiation gets tricky, and a business’s reality depends on competing commercial factors.
AI can draft clauses, but it cannot engineer trust and make quick, important judgment calls.
At Flint, our practice has always been built around the people and relationships behind the contract. We take the time to understand not just the business, but the human dynamics that shape it. We consider the history between the parties, the commercial pressures, the ambitions, and the anxieties. That contextual awareness is developed through years of experience, and it changes everything about how a negotiation is handled.
We overlay personal insight, judgment, and an understanding of human behaviour onto the legal positions that we suggest. That combination of legal experience, empathy, and human understanding is often the key to moving a matter forwards.
Moving forward with Flint
We are genuinely excited about what AI makes possible for our clients and for our firm. It makes us more agile, more responsive, and better able to focus our experience where it counts.
But the conversations that close deals, repair relationships, and get businesses moving – those remain stubbornly human.
If you’re navigating a stalled negotiation, working through an unwieldy AI-drafted contract, or need an opinion that will help rather than hinder – we’d welcome the conversation.