Mumbai: Artificial intelligence is increasingly underpinning everyday legal work at India's largest conglomerates, helping in-house teams review contracts, track regulatory compliance, and streamline routine tasks, a trend that could reshape the relationship between corporate legal departments and external law firms. The pressure driving the shift is familiar: do more, spend less. However, industry experts say the current scale and speed of adoption suggests a deeper shift is underway.Recently, in what could be the first such initiative, the Aditya Birla Group launched a legal innovation centre, 'Minerva'. The initiative will make the group's legal function more agile, data-driven and business-aligned, using AI to strengthen risk management, improve decision-making, and deepen collaboration with law firms and other partners.Other large conglomerates are also adopting AI assets with equal urgency given the rising legal costs. Jatin Jalundhwala, general counsel at Adani Group, said the initiative to adopt AI is already delivering accurate results very quickly."The ultimate objective is being strategic; we expect AI to help us achieve efficiencies across the majority of our tasks while simultaneously reigning in rising legal costs," said Jalundhwala.Listed companies spent more than ₹86,500 crore on legal costs in FY25, a 14% increase from ₹76,163 crore a year earlier, according to ETIG data.Also read | Corporate funding for multidisciplinary partnerships likelySanjeev Gemawat, managing director and group general counsel at Essar Group, said, given the scale and diversity of the group's operations, AI will play a key role in service delivery across businesses, and moreover, help in creating an agile and future-ready legal function. Vendors and platforms powering this shift say the demand reflects a deeper structural change in how legal functions have been functioning over the past years.Experts pointed out that AI is emerging as an infrastructure layer that allows legal teams to scale without a proportional expansion of teams and budgets."The most forward-looking organisations are not asking how to replace lawyers, but how to enable legal teams to focus more on judgment, strategy, negotiation, and decision-making," said Saakar Yadav, founder of Lexlegis.Legal executives say the AI shift is not just about speed but also about organising institutional legal knowledge. Chinmay Bhosale, co-founder of legal AI platform NYAI, said fragmented information across contracts, emails, policies and litigation records creates inefficiencies. AI is helping build an "always-on legal infrastructure" that supports decision-making across business functions, he said.Also read | Ambani rolls a three-sided dice for Reliance's futurePankaj Harlalka, co-founder of S45, India's first AI-native investment bank, said even in complex areas such as initial public offerings (IPOs), a major share of legal, compliance, and transaction activity will be increasingly handled by AI, adding that the shift would be "fundamental rather than incremental" and would "reshape how banking and financial services firms operate over the next decade."The transformation is not confined to corporate legal teams alone; it is reshaping hiring of external law firms by corporates."Most law firms will obviously continue to use technology where it improves execution; AI follows suit," said Justin M Bharucha, managing partner at Bharucha & Partners. "But the harder question is what that changes for the client. Once the process becomes faster, firms have to be clearer about what still requires human reasoning and opinion, judgement if you will; where the professional responsibility and liability sits; and what exactly the client is paying for."