Ahead of Global Legal Post’s webinar on The Future of Legal Drafting: How People and Al Can Unleash the Power of Firm Knowledge – sponsored by LexisNexis – webinar host and InterAlia Consulting founder Andrea Miskolczi talks about her transition from transactional lawyer to innovation leader and shares her thoughts on how Gen AI can reshape knowledge management.
Tell us about your professional journey that led you to creating InterAlia Consulting?
I launched InterAlia Consulting, a boutique advisory for law firms and legal departments on the strategic and change management aspects of legaltech and AI transformation, in 2023. Before that, I was Europe director of innovation at Dentons, where I led innovation, legaltech and legal project management across continental Europe. Earlier in my career, I was chief innovation and business development officer at Wolf Theiss, a regional law firm headquartered in Vienna.
Originally, I trained and practised as a transactional lawyer for around 10 years, working at Linklaters and Clifford Chance in Budapest, London and Berlin. Alongside my consulting work, I now sit on the advisory board of Lexpo, a leading legal innovation conference in Europe. A personal highlight in my career was being nominated for the Financial Times Innovative Lawyers Award in 2022. Although I didn’t win, the recognition was a strong motivator and helped give me the confidence to launch InterAlia.
What made you swap day to day lawyering for those innovation roles?
Looking back, the key driver for me was impact. In transactional work, even on large M&A or capital markets deals, I often felt that the most influential advice came from investment banks or other advisers. Lawyers play a critical role, but we are rarely the main drivers of change, and I found it hard to see the tangible impact of my work.
That changed when I moved into business and innovation roles. I was leading transformation initiatives, building new projects from the ground up and helping firms work in different ways. These roles gave me far more scope to be creative, to put forward ideas and see them implemented. Most importantly, I could clearly see the results of that work, which I found far more motivating.
What do you find most rewarding about your current role?
What I find most rewarding is being able to make things happen for a wider range of law firms and in-house teams. I work across a broad variety of projects, and even within similar focus areas, no two engagements are ever the same.
I also really value the people side of the role. I get to work with different teams, cultures and seniorities, which makes the work both varied and engaging. That diversity keeps the role fresh and gives me a different kind of involvement than I had before.
What potential do Gen AI tools have to improve law firm knowledge management?
First, I would move the conversation away from ‘knowledge management’ and focus on knowledge itself. Law firms are often described as a people business, but more accurately, they are a knowledge business. Lawyers are knowledge workers, and knowledge sits at the heart of everything the firm does.
Knowledge management has long been recognised as important, but it has also been a difficult area to get right. While some firms have built strong knowledge strategies, many have struggled, often for the same reasons.
Gen AI helps address two of the biggest challenges. The first is demonstrating value. Historically, it was hard to convince lawyers why investing time in collecting and maintaining precedents really mattered. With Gen AI, the link is much clearer: better data leads directly to better outputs, which lawyers can see for themselves.
The second challenge has always been resourcing. Many firms, particularly in continental Europe, do not have large knowledge management teams to collect, classify, anonymise and curate content. Gen AI can support this work by helping with anonymisation, creating first drafts from precedents and making existing knowledge far easier to reuse. In that sense, it lowers the barrier to building and maintaining a useful knowledge base.
How should firms go about implementing this technology?
It’s useful to start with what not to do, because I see this approach very often. A firm hears about a tool at a conference or from a persuasive salesperson, decides to run a pilot and hands out licences without a clear plan. After a few months of testing, there is uncertainty about next steps and no real decision is made.
The first question firms should ask is a simple one: “Why are we doing this?” There needs to be a clear organisational objective. Is the goal to speed up non-billable work, improve efficiency in client-facing matters, or both? Whatever the aim, it should be clearly defined and, where possible, linked to measurable outcomes.
Alongside this, firms need to define success at a project level. What does success look like for this specific initiative? Which KPIs will tell us that it is working? Once that is clear, firms can move into a structured process of scouting, testing, evaluation and implementation.
This is also where change management becomes critical. People are generally curious and enthusiastic about AI, so getting volunteers for pilots is rarely the problem. The real challenge is ensuring that tools are used consistently, for the right use cases, and embedded into everyday ways of working.
The Global Legal Post special report on legal drafting was based on interviews with top European law firms: what are your key takeaways from the report?
One of the strongest themes in the report is that AI is not changing what good drafting looks like, but it is changing how lawyers get there. Drafting in large law firms has never been about starting from a blank page. It has always involved working from precedents, templates and prior experience, with guidance from more senior lawyers.
What AI does is remove a lot of the friction from that process. Instead of spending time searching across folders, systems or personal archives, lawyers can access relevant knowledge much more quickly and in context. That makes the process more efficient, but it also raises the importance of having well-curated, reliable firm knowledge behind the tools.
There is also a lot of discussion around training junior lawyers. The report makes it clear that juniors will still learn how to draft, but the focus will shift. Rather than spending time on repetitive first drafts, they will spend more time reviewing AI-generated output, understanding why certain clauses are used and developing judgement. That only works if firms invest in strong knowledge foundations and clear standards of quality.
Overall, the takeaway for me is that AI doesn’t replace drafting skills or experience. It amplifies them. Firms that treat AI as a shortcut will struggle, but those that see it as a way to make better use of their collective knowledge will be far better placed in the long run.
The Global Legal Post is hosting a webinar, on The Future of Legal Drafting: How People and Al Can Unleash the Power of Firm Knowledge.
Join this free live webinar – sponsored by LexisNexis Europe – on 19 February at 12:00 CET to explore how law firms are beginning to transform legal drafting, combining human expertise with Al to unlock firm knowledge, improve consistency and drive efficiency.
To download a copy of The future of legal drafting: How people and AI can unleash the power of firm knowledge, published in association with LexisNexis, click here.
Email your news and story ideas to: [email protected]
