Last week, on the eve of the AI Forum of the German Lawyers’ Association (DAV), BRYTER hosted a Prost & Prompts at the Deutsche Bank Business Club in Berlin — a high-energy, no-nonsense discussion on how AI is reshaping legal work.
Tobias Kugler, Legal Counsel, Cariad SE (Volkswagen Group), Christoph Hedekamp, Head of Legal Operations, Hausfeld, and Tom Brägelmann, Lawyer / Attorney and Counsellor at Law, Annerton, discussed the real use cases with legal AI — with Michael Grupp, CEO, BRYTER moderating. And moderating was a tough job as the unscripted, unfiltered conversation soon became a vivid discussion.
One thing was clear: AI is here, it works, and the benefits are obvious. But for the rest of the questions, the panel debated: is it only incremental change, is it only personal productivity, and what are the impacts of mass adoption?
Legal AI — from hype to reality
Michael Grupp wasted no time in cutting through the noise.
“When we were here the last time in 2019, everything was different. AI in legal was just called legal tech.”
The joke? While the impact of AI is obvious, in some ways, not much has changed. Yet.
The excitement tools like ChatGPT have created means that AI is no longer relegated to IT and innovation teams. Lawyers themselves are now talking about it and actively looking for ways to use it in their professional lives.
Legal professionals have spent years hearing about AI’s potential, but the conversation has moved beyond speculation. The shift is real. Clients are beginning to expect AI-driven efficiency, and legal teams are under increasing pressure to modernize processes.
For every legal task, teams now ask: Can this be done faster, cheaper, and better?
With a technology as versatile as GenAI, feasibility isn’t the issue. Adoption and implementation are.
AI and legal workflows — efficiency without sacrificing accuracy
AI isn’t just speeding up legal processes — it’s changing the very nature of legal work.
What happens when AI is the one reading, analyzing, and structuring data? What happens when the tedious, labor-intensive work that once required entire legal teams is done in hours, not weeks?
Tobias Kugler, an early adopter of AI at Cariad (Volkswagen Group), laid out a stark example of how AI has transformed open-source compliance checks. Traditionally, companies like Volkswagen relied on external law firms to manually assess whether software licenses complied with regulations — an expensive, slow process.
“We used to rely on law firms to manually assess software licenses — costing six figures and taking months. With AI, we can now do the same thing in hours for around €100.”
The efficiency benefits became an immediate topic of debate. Reducing outside counsel costs by 95% caught the attention of the law firm representatives on the panel.
“Sure, clients can automate, but who bears the risk? Who will assure the service?”
asked Tom Brägelmann, leading author in AI and law, and one of the earliest thought leaders in the space.
Efficiency gains, quality improvements, and enablement
“There is not only an increase in speed and efficiency, but also an increase in quality,” explained Tobias Kugler. “AI isn’t just about speed; it’s about structure, consistency, and reducing risk.”
And that reshapes the need for external expertise, shifting more capabilities in-house.
“AI changes the entire process. It is no longer a manual assessment of semantically unstructured text where teams read and interpret. Instead, it’s a streamlined, structured process that changes how we work entirely.”
Tobias emphasized that this is a shift from 0 to 1, not just an incremental increase in productivity.
For him, this is the biggest impact of AI on the corporate side — and something that will, without a doubt, redefine the relationship between in-house teams and law firms.
Lawyers have always been prompting
Another key theme in the discussion was how AI enables lawyers to work more effectively.
Tom Brägelmann pointed out that prompting isn’t new — lawyers have been doing it long before AI arrived.
“When I started in law, I used to work at a law firm and would write a memo for my boss, which I sent to him as a Word document.”
“My partner would print it out, scribble something in the margins, scan it, and send it back to me. It took me an hour just to read it. But what did my partner actually do back then? He was prompting me. He didn’t rewrite everything directly but instead gave me guidance, saying, ‘Please don’t do it like this here or there.'”
What’s changed?
Rather than replacing legal expertise, AI is becoming a sparring partner — a tool lawyers can use to refine their arguments, anticipate opposing positions, and stress-test their reasoning. As Tom said:
“For me, the biggest impact of AI is the enablement of us all. Everyone is a partner now. We all have our virtual first-year associates at our fingertips”
Rather than replacing legal expertise, AI is becoming a sparring partner — a tool lawyers can use to refine their arguments, anticipate opposing positions, and stress-test their reasoning.
Christoph Hedekamp described how legal professionals are already using AI to sharpen their arguments:
“I know many colleagues in our company who actually use it as a sparring partner for arguments. You can challenge both the opposing arguments and your own. The great thing is that it’s limitless. You can simply ask, ‘Give me 100 counterarguments,’ and there will definitely be something useful among them.”
The legal profession is now split between those who see AI as a passing trend and those who are already restructuring their operations around it.
The consensus from the Q Club panel? AI isn’t optional anymore.
Clients are watching. Efficiency is no longer a competitive advantage — it’s the baseline.
Tom Brägelmann put it bluntly:
“If we worked more efficiently, we wouldn’t need AI for half of these problems. But we don’t. So AI is stepping in to fix our inefficiencies.”
The AI adoption gap — solving inefficiencies that should have been solved before
Michael Grupp shared examples of how AI isn’t just solving new problems — it’s solving long-standing inefficiencies in legal workflows.
“A court will probably not send an XML file containing the claim. And lawmakers won’t release new laws as structured data anytime soon. But in order to work with rules and regulations in big organizations, we HAVE to turn all of those unstructured texts into structured information.”
“In order to trigger a workflow, we need to turn an ‘it depends’ into a binary ‘yes or no.’ We could have solved this with big systemic changes, but we didn’t — so we now leverage AI to bridge the gap.”
“We have several customers using AI just to fill a database with information from documents that come as a scanned PDF.
Christoph Hedekamp highlighted a real-world example of this, where AI eliminated a manual, labor-intensive process almost overnight:
“That’s funny — this is exactly one of our use cases,” Christoph pointed out. “We had been doing this manually, and AI just solved the whole process. It’s the groundwork, the mundane stuff, that isn’t necessarily complex but has a huge impact when automated.”
The low-hanging fruit of AI adoption is in these repetitive, high-volume tasks that lawyers have always had to grind through. Document classification, summarization, information extraction — these aren’t cutting-edge AI applications, but they’re already creating massive efficiency gains.
And those gains inevitably raise bigger questions about the structure of legal work itself. Fee models, workforce size, and the role of external counsel are all being reevaluated.
Tom Brägelmann reflected on the long-term outlook:
“In 2030, we may have slightly fewer lawyers, but we will still be many. We will have the freedom to focus on what is complicated, and we will still be paid for this.”
Christoph agreed — but Tobias Kugler had a different perspective from the corporate side:
“I must admit that I see a different world. The efficiency benefits and the tremendous potential for big organizations are just too big to ignore, so I just cannot imagine that the legal market as it exists today won’t be significantly impacted.”
The fundamental reality is that clients are actively looking for cost savings and efficiency improvements, and AI is delivering them. Whether law firms embrace AI proactively or resist until they’re forced to change will determine how the industry evolves.
What should legal professionals do now?
The panel was clear: Waiting is not a strategy. AI is here. Every lawyer, whether in-house or private practice, should be actively experimenting, testing, and learning—not delegating AI adoption to someone else.
As Christoph Hedekamp advised:
“Test it out yourselves, today. Don’t delegate. Do it yourself. There is a benefit for everybody— you just need to discover it.”
The discussion also turned to the limits of AI training and the next stages of development. Audience questions sparked a debate about whether the technology we already have is enough to reshape the industry.
Tom Brägelmann and Christoph Hedekamp saw the current AI capabilities as more than sufficient to create a major shift:
“Frankly, I think with the power we already have today, we will get very far,” they agreed.
But Tobias Kugler took a different view:
“I don’t think we’ve even seen mass adoption yet. Most people may have tested ChatGPT in their personal lives, but the vast majority aren’t using AI actively in their professional work. And on a larger scale, we haven’t even put the right regulatory structures in place to enable it.”
The legal industry is still behind — AI adoption is only just beginning
Michael Grupp and Tobias agreed that the current level of AI adoption is far lower than the hype suggests.
“We are in a bubble. We are far from leveraging even the low-hanging fruit of bringing AI to work,” Michael said.
He pointed out that despite the AI buzz, most people haven’t actually integrated it into their workflows.
“Ask 10 people on the street — I bet half of them have never used ChatGPT,” he said. “I’ve spoken at several events over the past year, and even among younger lawyers, only half have really worked with the tool. And how would they, if they aren’t even legally allowed to use it in their firms yet?”
There’s a clear gap between AI’s potential and its actual use in the legal industry.
“We’re only now seeing tools that consider attorney-client privilege and real compliance requirements,” Tom Brägelmann pointed out.
The Q Club panel’s takeaway? The legal industry isn’t even close to mass adoption yet. AI is ready — lawyers just need to start using it.
The verdict — AI is here, now what?
The panel didn’t end with speculation. It ended with a challenge: stop overthinking and start experimenting.
Because in a world where AI is already reshaping the way legal work gets done, the firms that lead won’t be the ones waiting for perfect answers. They’ll be the ones asking better questions, testing real solutions, and making AI work for them — right now.
