Carole Piovesan of INQ Law on AI, privacy law and emerging legal frontiers

She will speak at the Canadian Legal Summit on how evolving practice areas are reshaping legal strategy

Carole Piovesan of INQ Law on AI, privacy law and emerging legal frontiers

In a recent episode of CL Talk, Canadian Lawyer’s podcast, Carole Piovesan, managing partner at INQ Law and a leading voice on AI governance and privacy, unpacks the legal profession’s response to the accelerating influence of artificial intelligence, the shifting regulatory landscape and the practical challenges of integrating emerging technologies into legal practice. She discusses the growing reliance on privacy law as a proxy for AI regulation, the evolving concept of responsible AI, and how law firms must rethink their business models and billing structures. Piovesan will speak on these issues at the Canadian Legal Summit 2025 in Toronto on October 9.

Below is a summary of the conversation:

"Privacy will continue to dominate." That’s the sharp prediction from Piovesan as she examines the shifting landscape of legal risk. Regulatory frameworks may be hesitant about artificial intelligence, but the urgency around data governance shows no signs of slowing.

"If you had asked me this six months ago, I would have said AI is actually moving quite quickly… [but] with the new government in Canada, there has been a clear shift away from the focus on regulation and guardrails and much more of an emphasis on the economic benefits of artificial intelligence," she says. That shift has immediate implications for legal practitioners advising on compliance, especially as previously tabled legislation like Bill C-27 stalls. "I suspect what we will see is more of a policy play on artificial intelligence that’s incentivizing safe adoption and responsible use, but not necessarily regulating it," she adds.

For Piovesan, the regulatory slowdown hasn't meant standing still. Her work has increasingly focused on where real-world decisions are made – in boardrooms, courtrooms and client strategy meetings – often requiring a practical deconstruction of AI risk. “When I go back to when I first really started in earnest… we were talking a lot more about ethical AI,” she says. That conversation has matured. “Since then, the debate has changed… to trustworthy AI and now to responsible AI.”

Responsible AI isn’t a slogan; it’s a framework. One that demands scrutiny across three buckets: data, models and outputs. “What does it mean to identify, collect and use [data]... Are we building models that are explainable? Do we understand how the model produced a particular output?” Piovesan asks. For the clients she advises, these are not theoretical considerations. In high-risk environments, they are expected to validate, measure and justify decisions powered by AI.

While this framework grows more sophisticated, the courtroom has started to reckon with the practical fallout. “We have one client… trying to better understand if they can use AI in an evidentiary capacity,” she says. And that’s not the only pressure point. “We’ve seen a number of lawyers… table briefs where the brief may have been completely AI-generated and therefore produced outputs that were fabricated.” Those incidents, and the strong judicial backlash they provoke, signal a profession trying to catch up with the tools it is starting to use.

This kind of disruption is not limited to litigation. Piovesan sees cross-border compliance as another flashpoint. “What we are now advising most of our clients is to play to the best practices that we have,” she says, pointing to frameworks like the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and ISO 42001. These offer more stability than the fractured regulatory environments of national governments. “Being thoughtful about the intended use cases… and adapting existing governance mechanisms to account for the risks inherent in those possible AI use cases is a very good approach,” she says.

That guidance also extends into the inner workings of law firms. The real transformation, she warns, is structural. “We really have to think dynamically about the business model as well as how we service our clients,” she says. While many of today’s tools might focus on case law or contract management, the back-end disruption will become more pronounced. “Being able to anticipate our billables better, being able to… fill in the narratives better… even in terms of some client communications,” are just the beginning.

Still, there’s caution in how tools are deployed. “Be careful. Be careful. Double check every case,” Piovesan says about AI-assisted legal research. The technology may organize or accelerate processes, but human judgment remains non-negotiable. “You will read it for everything, and you’ll make sure you agree with everything,” she stresses. “The failure to stand behind every single word of whatever you put before a court, or frankly, to a client, is a failure in your profession.”

Preparing the next generation of lawyers requires a recalibration. Law schools and firms need to pivot from rigid, rule-based training to a more adaptive, tool-based pedagogy. “The input has to be super specific to what you want,” she says of using large language models. Prompt engineering becomes a legal skill. So does quality assurance. “It’s never 10 minutes, because the QA part is going to take you a while.”

That shift is not just technical; it is cultural. “We are going to shift in law from being sort of ‘no, yes but,’ or ‘no maybe,’ to ‘yes and…’” Piovesan says. Legal teams, especially in-house counsel, will have to move from red flags to green lights, enabling rather than restricting. “We want to make sure that business has a reason to come to us early, and that we’re seen as a partner with business,” she explains.

Perhaps the most far-reaching challenge is in reimagining the entire billing model. “The Law Society has already given us guidance that if we’re using generative AI tools… you’re still, if billing by the hour, billing by the hour,” she says. That breaks the economics. If technology accelerates delivery but fees remain hourly, firms risk eroding their margins. “We’ll have to think about and potentially change the way we engage with our clients to promote more alternative fee arrangements.”

The frontier Piovesan maps out does not treat law as static. Legal services are no longer simply reactive or advisory. They are becoming embedded into governance, technology development and business strategy workflows. As she puts it, “We will see the emergence of an AI incident response plan… similar in concept and in process to the cyber incident or the data incident response plan.”

It is no longer just about adapting to new tools. The profession itself is being rewritten in real time.

Piovesan will appear on a panel entitled "Emerging legal frontiers: Key practice areas shaping the future of law" at the Canadian Legal Summit in Toronto on October 9. To learn more or register for the event, visit the Canadian Legal Summit website.

This conversation can also be found here:

The episode can also be found on our CL Talk podcast homepage, which includes links to follow CL Talk on all the major podcast providers.