Calfee Connections

In a November 2024 CLE seminar offered to clients, Calfee Intellectual Property Partner Bradley S. Pulfer moderated a conversation with in-house counsel, and addressed the rapid development of emerging technologies, including AI, that are impacting corporate legal departments and their organizations at every level. The discussion focused on how corporate use of AI is being addressed by sophisticated companies today, including tips for remaining agile as the development and adoption of emerging technologies progress in the future.

Watch the full video.

Recording from Calfee’s November 2024 CLE seminar, "Securing the Future: AI, Data Privacy, and Cybersecurity for Businesses," hosted by the Intellectual Property Practice Group, Columbus, Ohio.

Video Transcript

Question on screen: How are you [in-house legal counsel] interacting with emerging technologies in your spaces?

Bonnie Smith:

I will make a total attorney disclaimer that the opinions I will express are my own, and they are not those of Rockwell Automation. At Rockwell, we are using AI probably in all facets. We are using it internally for internal productivity, as I'm sure most of you are in your day-to-day work. We are exploring it for customer-facing applications. That is a newer journey that we're on.

We are both brand-labeling technology. So, we are taking other providers…we currently have a camera imaging system that looks at beverage lines to look for anomalies. So, we are brand-labeling that as a Rockwell product. It's one of our new offerings. We are implementing code generation as a Copilot offering. So, with our software, we have a Copilot that will generate PLC code. That's a new offering that we're doing.

And then another one that we're doing is a chatbot that would help our customers commission and troubleshoot their drives. So, it would refer in natural language to some of our product literature and help our customers set up their drives in a way that they can more easily understand.

Georgia Yanchar:

Hi everybody, it's so good to see so many familiar faces. I was at Calfee for a lot of years, so it's fun to be in this building and be with so many of you guys again. And to see some new faces, too. I started my current role about almost five years ago now at MRI Software, which is a company that was actually founded in Cleveland in 1971 as Management Reports, Inc. So literally real estate companies would bring all their ledgers and request a management report. And eventually that became automated, became software.

So, AI is kind of like the latest evolution of this like 53-year journey. Now we have about 180 or 200 products all over the world that have to do with real estate, commercial real estate, residential real estate, and occupiers. If you think of a bank that has hundreds of leases, you know, for all the buildings that it's occupying, how do they gain insights into all of that? Into all of this data? And a lot of our companies, our customers have many of our products. And so how do you bring all of a customer's data together and allow them to have insights that are actionable into their data? We've been super excited about adding AI into all of our product offerings for several years now.

In terms of the client-facing stuff, we bought a company in Germany right before I got there, which our product is MRI Contract Intelligence. And literally our clients can use our AI tools to run queries across all of their leases and just get actions as to that.

We're building data lakes where clients' data can all be combined in the one data layer so that they can, again, run queries into their own data to find out, okay, do I have any one bedrooms available at Sunny Vista Apartments? On my phone, it tells me, right?

Things like a property management company that is having to, day after day, do repetitive descriptions of the apartments. They can use generative AI built into our products to describe the beautiful one bedroom at Sunny Vista Apartments, right?

We also have like footfall analytics, so, if you have a grocery store chain, for example, and you want to find out actionable insights into how many people and what's the demographics and things of people in the wine aisle, you can use our contract intelligence to be like, yeah, women in their 40s spend a lot of time there. We might want to move our kiosk over here where there's more traffic, or whenever the door is closed over here, then more people go here, and they buy more coffee. You can get all kinds of insights into footfall.

We also are using AI to check and make sure that identities are legitimate. If a person comes to view an apartment, you're going to waste a whole lot of time if that person is actually a fraudster, and you could endanger the person who's actually showing the apartment. And you also are going to end up probably getting stuck with the bill when they don't pay their rent. So, just using facial recognition and things and tools to screen out those fraudulent people right at the outset when they come to look at the apartment is another really cool tool. And that's one that we've actually got patented, and Calfee is helping us write the patents on. It's just a really cool product that adds safety.

We have many, like many, many of our products are building in all over the world with AI.

And then of course we're using it internally as well. A project that I've got going on this year is, we've done 50 or so acquisitions since 2017, about 25 since I've been there. So, we've got contracts in various databases all over the world. Bringing all of that together, it's where we're at like 2.5 million documents at this point, just the legal files, so that we can run queries so we can more quickly cancel clients that need to be canceled for not paying. Which clients have termination for convenience? You can run all kinds of things to just get insights into it.

And our marketing team is looking at, isn’t it cool if they could bring together all of the marketing collateral for all of our products and figure out which ones don't have proper trademark usage, they didn't … but they're using Checkpoint instead of Checkpoint ID or whatever, can find all those, fix them.

And then of course with product, I mean, saving so much time with generating code and even more importantly quality control on the code, the ratio of developer to quality control of checking the code is just orders of magnitude higher using AI. So, all kinds of things.

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Series: 

1. AI Considerations for Corporate Legal Departments Video Series (Part One): How Are Companies Interacting With Emerging Technologies Like AI?
2. AI Considerations for Corporate Legal Departments Video Series (Part Two): What Are the In-House Legal Department Considerations in Branding Their Company's AI?
3. AI Considerations for Corporate Legal Departments (Part Three): What Are the Corporate Legal Department Considerations for Policies Related to Implementing Generative AI?
4. AI Considerations for Corporate Legal Departments Video Series (Part Four): How Are Corporate Legal Departments Balancing Customer Demand and Risk Considerations Related to AI-Enhanced Technologies?
5. AI Considerations for Corporate Legal Departments Video Series (Part Five): How Can In-House Legal Counsel Partner With Their Business Units to Support Innovation While Still Addressing Compliance, Ethics and Other Concerns?
6. AI Considerations for Corporate Legal Departments Video Series (Part Six): What Are Companies Doing to Adjust for the Regulatory Landscape in the AI Space?
7. AI Considerations for Corporate Legal Departments Video Series (Part Seven): How Can Companies Leverage These Emerging Technologies to Improve Legal Operations?

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