There's a particular kind of inevitability being marketed to the legal industry right now, and it should make us uncomfortable. The pitch goes like this: artificial intelligence governance frameworks are the future of tech law, they're coming whether we like it or not, and the smart money is already positioning itself. Law firms are hiring "AI governance specialists." In-house counsel are rushing to build compliance protocols. Legal tech vendors are rebranding their existing products as governance solutions.
The problem? We're treating something that barely exists as though it's already established doctrine.
Let's be clear about what we're actually looking at. We have fragmentary regulations emerging in different jurisdictions. The EU has the AI Act. A few countries have draft frameworks. The United States, meanwhile, has a collection of sector-specific rules that barely speak to each other, let alone to artificial intelligence comprehensively. We have executive orders and agency guidance that read like they were written by people who just learned what a neural network is.
That isn't governance. That's the absence of governance being dressed up as a coherent system.
The industry is banking on something different, though. It's banking on the assumption that governance frameworks will crystallize soon, that they'll be stringent, and that early adoption of voluntary compliance protocols will buy goodwill and competitive advantage. It's a reasonable hedge. It's also a bet being presented with far more certainty than the underlying facts warrant.
Here's what skeptics should notice: the vendors pushing "AI governance" solutions have a vested interest in making governance sound inevitable and complex. The more complicated the landscape appears, the more their products seem necessary. The consulting firms offering AI governance advisory services benefit from uncertainty itself. If the rules were clear and straightforward, there would be less to advise about.
Meanwhile, the law firms positioning themselves as AI governance specialists are making a calculation about future demand. That's legitimate business strategy. But when those same firms then contribute to the narrative that AI governance is coming and that everyone needs expert help navigating it, we should recognize the circular logic at play.
The trend being sold is this: AI governance is inevitable, it's coming fast, and you need to prepare now or face consequences. Embedded in that framing is an assumption worth questioning: that we actually know what the governance framework should look like.
We don't. Not really.
We're still debating foundational questions. What should regulators actually regulate? Outputs or processes? Companies or models? Should governance be prescriptive or principle-based? How do we balance innovation with accountability? These aren't settled questions with knowable answers. They're contested terrain where legitimate disagreement persists.
But the market doesn't like unsettled questions. It prefers narratives of inevitability. So the inevitability gets sold first, and the actual substance gets sorted out later, if at all.
None of this means AI governance won't happen. It probably will, in some form, eventually. But the gap between "this will probably exist someday" and "this is an urgent, knowable thing you must prepare for right now" is wider than the current marketing suggests.
A healthier approach would acknowledge what we don't know. It would be skeptical of vendors and firms with financial incentives to inflate the urgency. It would push back on the idea that we're all operating from a shared understanding of what "AI governance" actually means.
The legal industry has always been good at preparing for things that might happen. But it's also been vulnerable to treating manufactured consensus as inevitable fact.
This trend deserves more skepticism than it's getting. Asking hard questions about whether we're preparing for governance that doesn't yet exist isn't obstruction. It's due diligence.