Most conversations about AI in legal departments focus on tools: which platform to buy, which workflow to automate, and which task to hand off to a model. Far fewer explore what AI means for how legal departments themselves are organized.
At FlexFest 2026, Ava Guo and Brendan McMurrer of AT&T will join Mirra Levitt, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder of Priori, to discuss the thinking behind LegalEdge, AT&T’s AI-enabled legal operating model. Their conversation will explore how legal work can be organized differently, how multidisciplinary teams are reshaping legal work, and what legal leaders should consider as AI becomes part of everyday legal operations.
From Tool Adoption to Operating Model Redesign
It’s easy to mistake AI adoption for transformation. A department can deploy new technology across contract review, research, or drafting and still be running the same operating model it always has: the same assumptions about who does the work, the same reliance on full-time headcount to absorb every type of matter, the same career paths, organizational structures, and staffing models that shaped legal departments before AI.
LegalEdge examines how legal work can be broken into modular components and intentionally routed across attorneys, legal operations professionals, technology, and outside providers based on who is best equipped to handle each part. That perspective opens a broader discussion about how legal departments are designed, how different disciplines work together, and how legal organizations continue to evolve.
Why Legal Work Is Becoming Easier to Unbundle
Traditional legal departments were built around the idea that legal work was difficult to separate into discrete components. Lawyers managed matters from beginning to end because the work was closely connected and often required the same individual or team throughout the process.
Today, that assumption is becoming less durable. As AI lowers the time required for many routine legal tasks and specialized legal expertise becomes easier to access, legal departments have more options than ever for how work gets done. That flexibility is creating new opportunities to rethink individual workflows and the operating model itself.
In many cases, realizing those benefits requires redesigning the work itself rather than simply introducing AI into an existing process. Breaking work into smaller components, evaluating how each step is performed, and rebuilding workflows with AI and human expertise in mind creates opportunities that did not previously exist.
As a result, recurring compliance questions, contract review, legal research, document drafting, and other well-defined activities can increasingly stand on their own. Each component can be routed to the resource best suited to handle it.
A single matter may involve in-house counsel providing strategic guidance, AI assisting with document review, flexible legal talent supporting specialized projects, an ALSP handling standardized work, and outside counsel advising on complex legal issues. Legal leaders have more flexibility to coordinate the right mix of resources for each part of the matter.
This evolution also has important implications for talent strategy. Legal leaders are considering when work should remain with full-time employees, when specialized expertise creates greater value, and how professional development changes as work becomes more modular.
It also increases the importance of judgment, relationship management, strategic thinking, and the areas of legal practice where human expertise continues to have the greatest impact.
Why Work Routing Matters
As legal work becomes easier to separate into distinct components, legal departments face a new challenge: deciding where each piece of work belongs.
Some work may stay with in-house counsel. Some may be completed with AI. Other work may be assigned to flexible legal talent, an ALSP, or outside counsel. The ability to make those decisions consistently and build systems that support those decisions at scale becomes an important capability for modern legal departments.
Intentional work routing sits at the center of the LegalEdge discussion. The session explores how legal organizations can design systems that consistently direct work to the right resource while supporting stronger governance, better talent strategies, and more scalable legal operations.
Hear From AT&T’s LegalEdge Leaders at FlexFest 2026
Ava Guo is AVP and Senior Legal Counsel at AT&T, where she has played a key role in the development of LegalEdge. Brendan McMurrer is VP and Associate General Counsel for LegalEdge at AT&T, leading the effort to translate new ideas about legal operating models into a working program inside one of the country’s largest legal departments.
Together, they will share what they have learned while building LegalEdge, including how the initiative has evolved through experimentation and what it has revealed about legal talent and organizational design. They will also discuss why iteration has been central to developing a new operating model.
As AI reshapes legal work, legal leaders will increasingly be asked to rethink how work is organized, staffed, and routed. That broader conversation sits at the heart of this FlexFest session and reflects a wider shift toward operating models built around experimentation, adaptability, and continuous learning.
The session, “Unbundling Legal Work: From Concept to Operating Model,“ is part of FlexFest 2026. Registration is now open at resources.priorilegal.com/flex-fest.
