Gaby Prechner, VP Product & Tech at Darrow, legal intelligence that surfaces hidden legal risks and turns them into actionable insights.gettyAI isn't just helping companies work faster. It's accelerating every dimension of how businesses operate. With acceleration comes a rapidly expanding surface area of risk, both cyber and legal. AI can surface hidden signals, transforming them into actionable insights that can identify harm before it compounds.This new category of continuous legal exposure management recognizes a long-time reality: Legal risk doesn't begin with a lawsuit. By the time litigation starts, the window to act has essentially closed. The signs of legal risk are everywhere and appear early, from regulatory filings and incident data to market shifts and litigation patterns. Until recently, firms didn't have a reliable, scalable way to spot signals and turn them into structured intelligence.​That's changing. The next generation of legal intelligence is built on a structured knowledge base of legal exposure drawn from available data sources, including regulatory filings, public records, market activity and litigation trends. Interpreted through deep legal context, it's designed to help corporate legal teams, law firms, financial institutions and insurers detect emerging risk and respond with clarity and speed.​Leveraging AI to spot risk sooner is a crucial differentiator. ​Unsurfaced risk proliferates, so there's ample opportunity for AI to help detect and mitigate harm. For example, at Darrow, we used AI to identify $400 billion in undetected employer exposure across employer-sponsored benefit plans. Other research highlights $20 billion in consumer costs from data breaches at companies that buy and sell consumer data collected online. Both indicate potential for significant claims.​These types of risk have always been there. AI now enables organizations to better understand, identify and mitigate them at scale. Making the most of AI for risk management requires businesses to determine where AI can be a differentiator. That requires a mindset shift.What cybersecurity can teach organizations about getting ahead of risk.​Organizations must shift their risk management mindset from reactive (responding to news headlines or lawsuits) to proactive (seeking potential risks before they become headlines or lawsuits). This approach is similar to how cybersecurity has evolved in response to the changing online environment. ​Today, an effective cybersecurity strategy demands the ability to continually observe beyond the organization's walls to detect potential threats. Consider a phishing email from an external entity that impersonates a trusted internal source and encourages employees to click a link that installs destructive malware.​To combat this, cybersecurity teams use automated tools that continuously scan emails, links and attachments sent to employees, authenticating them before they can pass through the perimeter. By monitoring for threats outside their walls, cybersecurity teams can prevent attacks before they happen.​Let's translate this into the legal world. ​We know pension fund mismanagement poses significant legal risk. That's largely because key stakeholders, such as legal and HR, can't lack a reliable, consistent process to scan for signals of mismanagement that could lead to a lawsuit.​By prioritizing risk-detection scanning and onboarding the technology that enables it, organizations can shift their competitive position from reactive to proactive. With this approach:​• Insurers have more inputs for calculating future risk, selecting good risk to underwrite and improving their claims strategy.• Plan sponsors and corporations can more readily identify compliance and legal risks outside their security perimeter.• Regulators have greater visibility into how plans are managed, increasing the likelihood of comprehensive, uniform enforcement.• Law firms can monitor their clients' legal posture from the outside and proactively offer advice and other services.As someone building in this space, I find the friction points familiar. Legal, insurance and finance teams still have many questions as they make these tools a more significant part of their workflows: data security and client confidentiality, the potential for inaccurate or biased outputs and the practical challenge of integrating new capabilities into existing processes—or sometimes redesigning those processes entirely. Underlying all of it is trust—in the outputs, the vendor and the technology to work within the constraints of a high-stakes professional environment.The industry needs to earn broader adoption by building tools that are transparent about their confidence levels, straightforward to integrate and designed to extend the impact of existing teams rather than replace them or bolt on as a one-off productivity play.The future of legal tech looks beyond the perimeter. ​AI in legal tech started as an efficiency move, yielding faster research, quicker drafting and shorter cycle times. The benefits were largely reactive and therefore limited, as the technology could only address known problems.Proactively using AI to reduce legal risk wasn't top of mind because technology hasn't existed that could manage the sheer volume of data, discern which sources were authentic and authoritative, and parse true signals from background noise.We've have been developing the ability to scan the web this way since before the AI boom. Now that it's here, the question is whether organizations are equipped to look beyond their perimeter to identify and address the risk they find.​Organizations should follow these three steps to proactively address legal exposure:1. Develop a consistent practice of looking outside the organization to identify risk, and do so efficiently and at scale, providing real-time insights and confirmation that policies are being implemented as expected.2. Create an always-on process for evaluating which areas within the organization introduce exposure, from a new privacy policy being developed to a product manager adding a pricing page on the app.3. Share a common taxonomy to ensure all stakeholders use the same language when discussing legal exposure, avoiding costly miscommunications.​Organizations are dynamic, not static. As they evolve by adding people, products, technologies, customers and more, they layer on new and different types of legal risk. As that legal risk grows and diversifies, organizations need the ability to continually look beyond their own perimeters to identify, understand and mitigate that risk before it finds them.​Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?