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Interview with Dominique Meert, Founder of The Visual Lawyer & 2KnowHow2
At the Legal Soft Skills Academy 2026, we focus on what truly makes the difference in an AI-driven practice: critical thinking and the ability to write effective prompts.
In this interview, Dominique Meert explains why clarity, structure and prompting are no longer optional, but essential skills for company lawyers who want to stay relevant.
Your background combines law, economics and visual design. What personal turning point made you want to make legal language clearer and more accessible?
The turning point was realising that being legally correct doesn’t necessarily mean being business-ready or client-friendly. I saw contracts and policies written by lawyers for lawyers, while the real audience was business teams, employees, or customers. As a result, they were often ineffective in practice.
My background in knowledge management reinforced that insight: knowledge only creates value if people can actually find it, understand it, and use it.
Clarity is not about “simplifying the law.” It is about making legal expertise usable. Visual design became a natural extension of that idea. Structure, hierarchy, and visuals such as timelines help people navigate complexity. Today, I see legal design as a business tool: better communication reduces friction, speeds up decision-making and improves trust.
Do you think AI will transform the way we practise law or, more fundamentally, the very way we think about legal reasoning?
Both, but at different levels. In the short term, AI is clearly transforming how we practise law: drafting, summarising, reviewing, comparing documents and retrieving information. But the deeper shift is cognitive. Company lawyers are moving away from being primarily “knowledge producers”. As AI commoditises access to legal knowledge, the real value of company lawyers will increasingly lie in judgment, strategic thinking and contextual decision-making. AI can generate answers quickly, but legal reasoning is still deeply connected to accountability, ethics, business context and human interpretation.
As company lawyers begin to delegate certain drafting tasks to AI, where do you think the line of human responsibility should be drawn?
Responsibility should always rest with the company lawyer, especially when legal interpretation, risk assessment or business impact is involved.
AI can assist with drafting, but it does not understand organisational context, stakeholder sensitivities, or strategic priorities as humans do. The danger lies in subtle inaccuracies, missed nuance or recommendations that sound plausible but are inappropriate in the business context.
Company lawyers should never outsource judgment.
In five years’ time, what will define a truly effective company lawyer in an AI-enhanced environment?
The best company lawyers will combine legal expertise with systems thinking, communication skills, and technological fluency.
Effective company lawyers will know how to collaborate with AI intelligently, how to validate outputs critically and how to guide the business strategically in a language they understand.
I also think adaptability will become a defining skill. Company lawyers who thrive will be those who remain curious and critical.
Personally, what has been the biggest shift in your perspective on generative AI since your first experiments with it?
What surprised me most was how much the quality of the output depends not only on the quality of the underlying data but also on the quality of the human thinking behind the prompt.
If we want to make legal knowledge searchable, understandable and reusable, we also have to learn how to write for automation. Whether humans, AI systems, contract automation tools or search engines interact with legal content, structure and clarity become critical. Poorly structured information creates friction not only for people but also for technology.
It reinforced my belief that legal drafting is no longer only about legal accuracy. Increasingly, it is also about making legal information usable, reusable and automation-ready.
Many company lawyers are curious about AI, but not always confident in using it well. Why is prompting becoming such an important professional skill?
Prompting is, essentially, a form of structured thinking. A good prompt requires you to clearly define context, objectives, audience, constraints and desired outcomes. Those are already core legal skills. The difference is that AI forces company lawyers to externalise their thinking much more explicitly. Poor prompts often produce generic or unreliable answers, while precise prompts lead to far more useful and nuanced outputs.
But effective prompting is not just about writing better instructions. It also requires a basic understanding of how generative AI works. Company lawyers do not need to become engineers, but they should understand the logic behind these systems, their strengths and their limitations.
If you do not understand concepts such as hallucinations, bias, grounding or the probabilistic nature of AI-generated responses, it becomes much harder to assess the reliability of the output critically.
That is why prompting is becoming such an important professional skill. It combines clear communication, critical thinking and AI literacy. The company lawyers who use AI well will not necessarily be the most technical ones, but the ones who know how to guide the system intelligently and evaluate the results responsibly.
If you had to give company lawyers one golden rule for prompting effectively, what would it be?
Don’t mistake speed for quality.
In practice, effective prompting is not about getting the fastest answer. It is about giving enough context and asking the right questions so you can obtain useful output that you can assess critically.