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CONTEXT
PROTOCOL:
T
echnical leaders
in legal services
have seen many
technical acronyms
and buzzwords
arrive with
transformational promise. Some
of these succeeded in reshaping
operating models; others merely
refined existing ones.
Model Context Protocol, or MCP,
has now entered the narrative.
Described at a technical level, it
standardizes how AI language
models discover and invoke
external tools and data sources
in a structured way. Based on the
open-source MCP definition, that
description is an accurate one, but
it is also an incomplete one.
The big, and strategic, question is
not how MCP technically works.
It is whether it shifts control in
enterprise AI architectures.
MCP's impact becomes materially
significant in primarily one
scenario: when it connects
governed knowledge layers
across organizational boundaries.
Under those conditions, the
future competitive moat for
law firms is increasingly going
to be the governed knowledge
layer. Without it, interoperability
lowers technical friction, and
with it, interoperability becomes a
in New Bottles?
