Being a creative lawyer: why creativity is becoming a core skill for in-house lawyers

As AI reshapes legal work, the skills that differentiate in-house lawyers are changing too. Summize General Counsel Lexi Lutz shares her perspective on why creativity, influence, and storytelling are becoming more important in the world of in-house lawyering.

When people talk about in-house legal work, creativity isn’t usually the first word that comes to mind. But if you spend time inside a legal team, it becomes clear that creativity is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. It just isn’t always labeled that way.  

The outcome of decisions often relies on our ability to tell stories: how we package an argument or a point of view in a way that makes sense to different stakeholders, and that point matters now more than it used to.

With AI starting to handle more of the structured work that traditionally took up our time (drafting, summarizing, first-pass analysis, clause comparison), our jobs are becoming more about the bit that sits between the legal answer and the business decision: interpretation, framing, persuasion, and influence.

That’s where we as lawyers are creating value in the AI era.

Legal work has always been more creative than it looks on paper

On any given day, we’re living in the grey – working through incomplete or shifting information, competing priorities, commercial pressure, and timing constraints and stakeholders who all have different opinions on risk. Crucially, we’re rarely just delivering answers. We’re trying to get our answers accepted, understood, and acted on. That’s where influence really lives, and where creativity shows up most clearly. It’s not necessarily about producing novel legal arguments, but shaping how those arguments land across different audiences in a business.

AI is changing the mechanics, not the need for influence

There’s no question that AI is changing how legal work gets done. First drafts are faster, summaries are instant, information retrieval is no longer the bottleneck it used to be.

That shift doesn’t remove complexity, it just relocates it. Once the production layer is automated, what stays is the harder part: deciding what matters and how to get others to act on it.

For example, AI can get you an answer quickly. It can’t tell you how that answer needs to be framed for your specific CFO versus your particular product team. It also can't tell you how to negotiate a complex agreement where the real work is in the mix of IP and indemnity concessions relevant to your company. The judgment calls that depend on knowing your business, your counterparty, and your risk appetite. AI is a useful adjunct there, but not a substitute.

To me, that distinction is really critical. Legal advice doesn’t exist in isolation, and we’re not a team sat in a cupboard away from the rest of the office. We, and our advice, must travel across functions, priorities, and perspectives. If it doesn’t land well, it doesn’t matter how “correct” it is.

So while AI changes the speed of execution, it doesn’t remove the need for persuasion, judgment, or storytelling. If anything, it just increases the importance of those skills, because now there’s just more information, provided faster, more output, and more noise to cut through.

Creativity in legal work is really about translation and framing

When in-house lawyers talk about being creative, we aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel. A lot of the time, a position or argument exists with very little wiggle room. What we’re trying to do is find a way to make something complex usable based on the context of the situation.

Sometimes that’s in the advice itself. Sometimes it’s in the process around it. I’ve seen creativity show up in how legal teams redesign intake, create self-service pathways for the business, rethink approval processes, or introduce AI into workflows. None of those things require lawyers to become technologists. They require them to look at an existing problem and ask whether there’s a better way to solve it.

Something I’m noticing in the stronger legal teams I work with is the shift in how they structure their advice – instead of delivering a single position, they’re now presenting context and options:

• What they can do

• What each option enables or restricts

• What trade-offs exist

• What they would recommend, given those factors.

The key is that a single answer closes the conversation. But options and context help the business make better decisions.

This is the bigger shift: a change in our job roles, rather than just being a change in communication styles.

As a lawyer, I feel less like a gatekeeper of legal correctness, and more like a translator between legal risk and business reality. And that translation is entirely human work, at least in my opinion. It requires reading a room, understanding stakeholder priorities beyond what I think they want, and adjusting the way I’m framing things depending on who’s on the receiving end.

The gap between legal teams is a design gap, not a knowledge gap

Most in-house legal teams are operating under similar pressures: more demand, faster business cycles, and limited resources. But the difference between successful teams isn’t about what they know anymore. It’s now about how they’re structured to work.

Some teams are redesigning how legal work enters the function and how it’s handled, using a combination of process design, automation and AI to reduce friction before work reaches a lawyer. Other teams are just using new tools to speed up existing workflows, without looking at the underlying model.

The strongest teams I've seen approach it differently: they've mapped their legal processes end to end, democratized knowledge across the team so it doesn't sit with one person, and built digital systems to track interactions and decisions. That kind of infrastructure means the team can iterate and improve, rather than just running faster on the same treadmill.

Over time, that difference compounds. Efficiency applied to an unchanged system doesn’t change outcomes, it just produces more of the same work, faster. The challenge is that the business isn’t just looking for more legal output. It wants faster decisions, clearer guidance, and less friction.  And increasingly, as in-house teams use AI to handle more of what used to go outside – partly because AI is making that feasible, partly because there's real pressure to reduce external spend – the volume of work that stays inside is growing. The teams that thrive will be the ones that have designed for that reality, not just the ones who adopted the tools.

Increasingly, legal teams are being valued for how effectively they keep the business moving, so the teams that thrive will be the ones that create capacity for higher-value work, rather than just processing a higher volume of requests.

Creativity is what connects legal thinking to business action

AI is changing the shape of legal work, but not the core challenge of in-house lawyering.

What’s changing is that the mechanical parts of the job aren’t the differentiator anymore. How well legal thinking travels is.

That depends on something AI can’t replicate: the ability to read the room, interpret context, frame arguments for different stakeholders, and tell the story in a way that leads to action. That’s where creativity really lies in modern in-house work, and why it’s becoming more important every day.

If you want to hear more from Lexi about being a creative lawyer in the age of AI, follow her on LinkedIn below.