Deborah Nas will be the keynote speaker at the upcoming Legal Management Forum, which will take place on September 28 and 29. Deborah is Professor of Strategic Design for Technological Innovation at Delft University of Technology and Director of Innovation at the Quantum & Society Center. With 25 years of experience working with large companies and startups, she combines academic expertise with a practical understanding of technological transformation. She also regularly appears in the media to explain artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies to a broad audience.
In this interview, she discusses the challenges that AI and quantum computing pose for the legal sector, from confidentiality and liability to regulation and strategic decision-making. Her contribution is part of the thirteenth edition of the Legal Management Forum, organised by the Aranzadi LA LEY Foundation and Inkietos. Under the slogan “12+1: Break the Code”, the event will bring together more than 600 professionals to examine, from a practical perspective, how law firms and in-house legal departments are changing.
As the keynote speaker, what key message would you like legal professionals to take away?
That you don’t need to understand the details of a disruptive technology to understand the timeline and the stakes. For example, quantum sounds like distant science fiction, but two things are already true today. First, the confidential data you protect right now can be copied today and decrypted later, once quantum computers mature. For a profession where confidentiality is key, this future technology already has implications today. Second, quantum will create new questions of regulation, liability and standards that someone has to answer. So my message is simple: this is not an IT topic you can delegate. It is a strategic one, and the time to start understanding it is now, well before it arrives.
The forum’s slogan is «12+1: Break the Code.» What «code» does the legal sector need to break around technology, what taboo or resistance must be overcome?
The code to break is the quiet belief that technology is someone else’s department. Law is a profession built on certainty, precedent and control, and deep technology offers none of those comfortably. As a result, the reflex is to treat it as the CTO’s problem and wait for the dust to settle. That «wait and see» instinct is the real resistance. The taboo underneath it is admitting that your field is being reshaped by things you don’t yet understand, which is uncomfortable for experts who are used to being the ones who explain. Breaking the code means claiming a seat at the technology table early, while the rules are still being written, instead of arriving afterwards to clean up the liability. The lawyers who thrive in the next decade will be the ones who decided technology was their business, not IT’s.
At a more practical level, quantum technology itself will also do some code breaking. At some point in time a powerful quantum computer will arrive that can break public-key encryption, which secures almost every connection and transaction online.
Do you see significant differences in how AI is approached in the legal sector across countries? What international practices should Spain look at?
Yes, and they track the broader regulatory cultures. The United States leans market-led and permissive, letting adoption run and dealing with problems afterwards. Europe leads with rights and risk, with the AI Act as the shared frame that Spain already sits inside. China is state-directed. Inside the legal profession the split is less about geography than about nerve: some bars and firms are racing ahead on adoption, others are frozen by worries about confidentiality and liability. Practice worth copying is not a single country, it is the habit of pairing fast adoption with clear professional guardrails. Within organisations, it’s not technology that determines the speed of change. It’s company culture and people’s behaviour.
Everyone talks about AI. Could quantum lead the next big revolution, and what exactly is quantum technology?
AI and quantum are not rivals for the same throne; they’re different kinds of thing. AI is software that is eating cognitive work, it is here now and everyone can touch it. Quantum is a new way of computing, based on the physics of nature’s smallest particles. It is more foundational but slower to arrive and far narrower in what it does. It is extraordinary for a specific set of problems, simulating molecules, optimisation, breaking cryptography, and useless for most everyday computing. So not a bigger AI. A different engine, for different problems. We’ll be able to solve problems we can’t today.
Why can quantum change economies, and how soon might this happen?
Through two channels. The first is creating value by solving problems classical computers cannot. Simulating molecules and materials could accelerate drug discovery, better batteries and cleaner chemistry. Optimisation could reshape logistics, energy grids and finance. Whole industries could compress years of trial and error into far less. The second channel is destructive: quantum threatens to break the encryption that our digital economy runs on, from banking to state secrets. Timelines for the development of quantum computers are uncertain. Narrow, useful advantages in specific niches are plausibly a matter of years. A machine powerful enough to break today’s encryption is genuinely unknown, with credible expert estimates ranging from roughly five to fifteen years, and concern has been rising that it could land sooner rather than later. What matters is that the defensive transition has to start long before that machine exists, which is why regulators have already set deadlines.
What practical effects can quantum have, in daily life or in business?
The effects reach you indirectly. Better medicines and materials, because quantum can model chemistry that classical computers struggle with. More efficient logistics and energy systems, because it is strong at optimisation. Sharper financial modelling. And, invisibly, a security upgrade running underneath everything you use, as post-quantum encryption is quietly built into browsers, banking and messaging. There is also a genuinely new capability worth flagging: for the first time we can build machines that produce certified randomness, randomness you can mathematically prove no one could have predicted, where today’s computers can only imitate it with predictable algorithms. That sounds abstract, but it matters anywhere fairness has to be demonstrable, drawing lots, random audits or inspections, allocating cases or selecting samples, where you want to prove that no one put a thumb on the scale. In business the ones who feel it first are two groups: organisations with genuinely hard optimisation or simulation problems, pharma, materials, energy, finance, and organisations sitting on secrets that must stay secret for a long time.
Will lawyers also have to familiarise themselves with this technology? How will quantum impact the legal sector?
Lawyers need to understand the implications, not the physics. Confidentiality first, because data harvested today can be decrypted once quantum matures, which turns your duty of confidentiality into an active question about how long your clients’ secrets must survive. Then a wave of new legal terrain: how do you regulate a technology this powerful, who is liable when quantum-enabled systems fail or are misused, what standards and export controls apply, who owns the intellectual property. Legal will be shaped less by lawyers using quantum than by lawyers governing it and protecting clients from its risks. In other words, quantum is not mainly a tool for your work, it could become part of the subject matter of your work.
Many firms already use AI for research or document review. Will they also use quantum as a working tool?
Mostly no, not as a tool they operate themselves. It helps to see where quantum actually lives: inside large high-performance computing centres, increasingly fused with AI. Quantum handles the narrow problems it is good at, AI does the rest, and together they work as one hybrid system. Law firms will consume the results through the cloud, the same way they use vast data centres today without ever running one. The part that should interest lawyers is not the tool, it is the consequence. When AI and quantum are braided together inside these systems, the output becomes even harder to explain. Transparency and explainability are already a live legal issue with AI on its own; add a quantum layer whose workings almost no one can follow, and the black box gets darker still. This makes it even harder to answer the question a court will keep asking: how exactly did the machine reach this conclusion?
What legal challenges will quantum bring around confidentiality and privacy?
The biggest threat: harvest now, decrypt later. An adversary does not need a quantum computer today to threaten you today. They can intercept and store your encrypted data now and simply wait, decrypting it the moment quantum makes that possible. For lawyers holding information that must stay secret for decades, mergers, litigation strategy, state matters, sensitive personal data, intellectual property, it means the clock is already running. That raises real questions. Does the duty of confidentiality already require moving clients to quantum-resistant encryption before the threat is live? At what point does failing to migrate become negligence? The reassuring part is that the tools exist, standardised post-quantum encryption has been finalised and regulators have set migration deadlines. The unresolved part is when the professional duty of care to act actually begins.
But quantum also cuts the other way, and offers new forms of protection. Quantum communication makes a line physically impossible to tap unnoticed: any attempt to intercept it disturbs the signal and exposes the eavesdropper. That ensures confidentiality and gives lawyers something they have never really had: a truly private conversation with a client at a distance. A related idea, blind quantum computing, would let you run confidential work on a remote quantum computer without its operator ever seeing your data, or even the question you asked, keeping privilege intact.
What relationship will exist between AI and quantum technology?
AI is helping to build quantum, used to design, calibrate and error-correct fragile quantum computers. In the other direction, quantum may one day accelerate parts of AI, certain machine-learning tasks. Both technologies concentrate enormous power in a handful of companies and countries, both move faster than our institutions do, and both hand law the job of writing the rules of accountability for systems most people, including most regulators, do not fully understand. That governance question is where AI and quantum truly converge.
How will the legal sector evolve over the next ten years?
Two very different shifts. The first is about lawyers using technology. In daily work AI will do the reshaping long before quantum does: routine drafting, research and review largely automated, and the value of a lawyer moving decisively towards judgment, strategy, accountability and trust, the things a client cannot get from a model. Firms will need fewer people on commoditised tasks and will pay a premium for those who navigate technology fluently.
The second shift is about regulating how this technology is developed and applied. Disruptive technologies are reshaping society, work and geopolitics faster than our institutions can absorb, and someone has to steer how these technologies are developed and applied, towards the outcomes we actually want rather than the ones that arrive by default. Legal professionals can have a key role in guiding technology’s direction, shaping the rules, the liability and the limits, so that AI and quantum serve society rather than simply happening to it.
