Peer to Peer: ILTA's Quarterly Magazine
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/1542659
P E E R T O P E E R M A G A Z I N E ยท W I N T E R 2 0 2 5 57 27001 are critically important for the baseline of any organization's IT, they are not sufficient on their own in 2025 and beyond. Legal leaders must face this problem as both a wake-up call and an opportunity. Clients, regulators, and insurers are raising the bar, as compliance is no longer a check-the-box activity; the demand for stronger, AI-specific safeguards will be either a missed opportunity or a key business differentiator. AI adoption is table stakes for keeping pace with the industry, but whether your AI systems are verifiably transparent and trustworthy will separate you from the crowd. WHERE ISO 27001 AND SOC 2 FALL SHORT SOC 2 evaluates the design and effectiveness of an organization's operational controls through five key principles: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. ISO 27001 defines a framework for an Information Security Management System (ISMS), which is a systematic approach to ensuring sensitive information is handled correctly. Both are valuable and important, but neither can provide complete visibility into the risks posed by AI. Neither framework explicitly asks whether your AI systems make fair or biased decisions, if they can explain how they arrive at outcomes, or what happens when hallucinated or harmful content is generated. There is also a lack of consideration for the downstream impacts of manipulated training data and inference endpoints. For the legal industry, blind spots regarding the ethics and operations of AI systems are perilous. As they are in a courtroom, the tenets of fairness, transparency, and dependability are paramount. A biased contract review model or a flawed ediscovery framework that provides incorrect answers is not just an operational risk; it undermines the fundamental credibility of a legal firm. Keeping pace with these changes is vital as regulators are moving quickly. The EU AI Act, U.S. AI Bill of Rights, NIST AI RMF, and ISO 42001 are just a few new compliance frameworks specifically focused on AI risks. Pressure from clients is also increasing, as RFPs and questionnaires now ask about AI governance, explainability, and third-party oversight. With the Whether your AI systems are verifiably transparent and trustworthy will separate you from the crowd.