AI moves from experiment to infrastructure in UAE legal sector

Dubai: When a supply chain is disrupted, a contract that has sat untouched for years can suddenly become critical.

A force majeure clause may determine whether a company is protected, exposed to losses or headed for a dispute.

For legal teams, the problem is often not knowing where to look, but finding the time to examine hundreds of agreements before a problem escalates.

That is where artificial intelligence is beginning to change the way legal work is done in the UAE.

Dmitry Grinik, founder and CEO of Legaline Platform, noted that AI adoption among UAE law firms and consulting practices has moved quickly from experimentation to practical use, particularly over the past three to six months.

“AI integration has moved from ‘experimental’ to ‘operational’,” Grinik said, pointing to growing pressure on legal and advisory teams as regional disruptions trigger contract reviews, renegotiations and tighter compliance checks.

Repetitive tasks

Rather than simply replacing repetitive tasks, AI is allowing lawyers to handle workloads that would previously have required significantly more time and manpower.

The change is becoming particularly visible among mid-sized firms. Large international law firms began automating internal processes several years ago, but smaller practices are now starting to build similar capabilities.

For them, the transition will take time. Grinik estimates that deploying AI agents across day-to-day operations could take nine to 12 months, partly because many mid-sized firms have limited internal IT resources.

Passive records

One of the more significant developments is the transformation of a firm’s own knowledge.

Case files, past agreements, internal precedents and document archives can be converted from passive records into AI-powered resources. Instead of searching through years of files, lawyers can use AI systems to draw on that institutional knowledge when assessing new matters.

The potential is particularly clear in force majeure reviews.

Companies operating in the UAE can face several legal frameworks at once. Federal law operates alongside emirate-level legislation, while the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) and Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) have common-law systems. Free zones can introduce additional regulatory requirements.

A company with operations across mainland UAE, DIFC, ADGM and free zones could, therefore, have hundreds of contracts governed by different rules. “Manual review across that scope is slow and uneven,” Grinik said.

Legal expertise

AI can scan large contract portfolios in hours rather than weeks, identifying clauses that may be ambiguous, potentially unenforceable or out of step with regulatory changes. Multiple AI specialists can also analyse the same issue from different perspectives before producing a structured assessment.

But Grinik sees AI as an extension of legal expertise, not a substitute for it.

Whether a force majeure clause applies ultimately depends on the wording of the contract, the commercial relationship and the facts surrounding the dispute. Those decisions still require human legal judgement.

The real advantage, he said, is moving companies from a reactive approach reviewing contracts only after a problem emerges to a proactive one.

AI push

A corporate counsel responsible for 200 contracts could, for example, identify potential weaknesses before a dispute reaches the courtroom.

For the UAE, Grinik believes the opportunity extends beyond individual law firms.

The UAE’s push towards AI adoption, including its target for 50 per cent of government activities to be powered by agentic AI by 2028, could help create an ecosystem where legal databases, data centres, universities and AI systems develop together.

He expects AI-driven legal infrastructure to become a basic requirement rather than a competitive advantage by the end of 2026.

The UAE’s legal environment could make it an especially important testing ground. With multiple jurisdictions, more than 40 free zones and a highly international business population, legal technology built for the UAE must be capable of navigating a level of complexity that few markets offer.

Grinik believes that complexity is not a weakness but an opportunity.

“The UAE is, in my view, the most interesting legal market in the world right now for building and validating legaltech hypotheses,” he said.

The bigger shift may therefore be less about lawyers being replaced by machines and more about lawyers being able to see further, work faster and act before a legal problem becomes a crisis.