Anthea Roberts launches Harvard project on AI, complex decision-making and the future of the legal profession

RegNet Professor Anthea Roberts, who is also a visiting professor at Harvard, has launched a major new research project with Professor David B. Wilkins at Harvard Law School examining how artificial intelligence is structurally reconfiguring the global legal profession. Hosted by the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School, the project’s first essays and interactive visualisations are now live, with a full series, a Harvard Law seminar, and continued student and practitioner engagement rolling out across 2026.

The project’s premise is that AI is not simply another technology being adopted by lawyers. Instead AI is “restructuring legal services, professional judgment, legal education, and the future shape of the legal profession.” Understanding that transformation, the project argues, requires seeing the legal profession as a system — one in which technology strategy, business models, training pipelines, regulation, and access to justice all interact in ways that no single vantage point can capture.

Roberts and Wilkins bring complementary lenses to the question. Roberts studies complex decision-making and builds AI tools for multi-lens analysis across risk, strategy, and policy; Wilkins has studied the legal profession as a system for decades — who enters it, how careers unfold, how firms make money, how the field globalises and transforms. The collaboration applies an approach Roberts calls “dragonfly thinking” — drawn from Philip Tetlock’s research on expert forecasting, which found that the best forecasters are integrative thinkers who synthesise multiple perspectives, much as a dragonfly’s compound eyes integrate thousands of lenses into nearly 360-degree vision.

The project is also distinctive in that it uses AI tools — built by RegNet’s Miranda Forsyth and Roberts’s strategic intelligence firm Dragonfly Thinking — to analyse AI’s impact on the profession. “We’re not writing about the AI experience from the outside; we’re living it from the inside,” Roberts said. “We are less interested in predicting who wins than in helping the profession see the system clearly enough to make better decisions within it. That means holding multiple lenses at once — the technology strategy, the professional structure, the economics, the training pipeline, the implications for access to justice — rather than collapsing them into a single story.”

The first wave of the series is now available at hlsclp.org, accompanied by interactive visualisations and a topic-network map of the project’s 170-source evidence base across 39 topics. The four opening pieces each take a different cut at the landscape:

Series Introduction: AI, Complex Decision-Making and the Future of the Legal Profession sets out why the project exists, what each co-author brings to it, and how AI, complex decision-making, and the structure of the legal profession intersect. It frames the multi-lens approach that runs through the series and introduces the topic-network map of the 170-source evidence base.

Law Is the Gateway Drug argues that law sits at the centre of business, regulation, and governance — and that this structural position makes it the natural gateway for AI across professional services. The essay explains why the serious early AI capital is flowing into legal, and asks whether law captures the gateway position or the gateway captures law.

Harvey’s Strategic Evolution reads the most-discussed legal AI company as a platform, infrastructure, and ecosystem play rather than a narrow chatbot story — an attempt to become the trust and coordination layer for AI-enabled professional services, and a test case for what platform expansion looks like inside a regulated profession.

Getting Your Hands Dirty turns inward, from analysing the system to experiencing it. Drawing on the authors’ own practice, it asks what it actually feels like to work with AI agents on complex intellectual tasks, why the gap between talking about AI and using it matters so much, and how the shift from doing to directing is reshaping high-end professional work.

This work builds on a 2024 senior leadership workshop Roberts and Wilkins co-led at Harvard with chief legal officers from Blackstone, Vanguard, BlackRock and AIG, and managing partners from Morgan Lewis, Orrick and McGuireWoods. Roberts and Wilkins will also be co-teaching a new seminar — AI, Complex Decision-Making, and the Future of the Legal Profession — which will run at Harvard Law School in Fall 2026.