Calfee Connections

During a Calfee panel discussion moderated by Intellectual Property Partner Bradley S. Pulfer, in-house corporate legal counsel shared how their respective companies are leveraging emerging technologies like AI to improve legal operations. Some examples from the discussion include how they’re using AI to boost productivity, improve decision-making, and free their teams to focus on higher-level, more interesting work.

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] leveraging these emerging technologies to improve legal operations?

Georgia Yanchar:

Pulling together all of our files into one place is the big initiative for this year so that we can just process cancellations faster, for example, make better decisions, and just gaining the insights into all of our contracts. It's just going to speed us up once it's all in one place.

We had to define our initiative, run AI through 50% of our legal contracts of our customer agreements, which was the metric I decided to set for this year. But then we had to decide, what does AI even mean? Is it a natural language question I can ask, or is it “we decided on a fuzzy search?”

But at least it's all in one place. It's OCR, it's machine-reading. And it's been going for weeks trying to even just get it, it's been a year-long project to pull it all together. But then even to process the data to make it all searchable and then building the AI tools, our product team and our AI teams have been fantastic partners with that. But just figuring out what kinds of questions we want to train it to answer. That's been a journey as well, but I think that's going to really speed us up.

And then again, what is AI? The other thing we did when I got there four and a half years ago, is that every single contract we did was manually created, so I had a team of legal admins who would go into Salesforce, pull data, copy and paste it into Word templates all day long, every day. And we're doing 10,000 contracts per quarter at this point. It was less four and a half years ago, but now 73% of that is completely automated. So, a salesperson can get a contract by clicking buttons in Salesforce, and it automatically pulls and creates that contract instantaneously. They don't have to put it in the legal queue and wait.

So that's allowing our legal admins, like one of them now, 50% of her time is spent on data privacy. They're learning. You think it's going to eliminate jobs? No, I have the same number of legal admins. They're just doing a lot more interesting stuff every day. And that's been great for their career development, for their satisfaction, and a lot of other things. It's been great for the business because now the contracts are getting to the customers much more quickly. And that's been huge.

Bonnie Smith:

Yeah, same. Also, we have internal playbooks for some of our contracts team when they're negotiating contracts, our standard terms and conditions. So now we're trying to use those.

Georgia Yanchar:

That's the whole other thing is using AI to actually respond to redlines is kind of the next phase that a lot of legal teams are going to.

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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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