Calfee Connections

Calfee Intellectual Property Partner Bradley S. Pulfer moderated a discussion with in-house corporate legal counsel where they shared their plans to adjust for the regulatory landscape in the AI space. The conversation focused on why enterprise-wide education, effective processes and measurable metrics are essential components of effective legal compliance related to corporate AI usage.

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: What are you [in-house legal counsel] doing to adjust for the regulatory landscape in the AI space?

Georgia Yanchar:

I think educating the C-suite as to the importance of these issues and the lift that is required to comply and just getting buy-in on staying across it and educating the company on it. For me, everything is about metrics. How many things did you automate? How many contracts did you create? I found at one point a couple years ago, all they're caring about, all the metrics they're asking me to report on have to do with selling and revenue, right? But I need a metric around compliance and what we're doing.

So we creatively came up with this whole rubric basically to do like a compliance score for each of our products and figure out what's the threshold and to say, okay, if we take each product, and we ask these 50 questions and we give a score, we figure out which one scored the least, and we make a promise that we're going to move our needle by x number points this year and x number points this year.

But I think putting in some kind of process, metric for improvement, like just keeping at it. It sounds like you guys have done a lot of just building the frameworks so you can keep across all this. It takes an investment of time. It takes creativity because every company is different and has its own challenges.

But I think just being really creative and collaborative and putting in place processes and measurements to stay across all of this is the main thing in getting buy-in.

Bonnie Smith:

I think education, that's a great point. A lot of it is education. I think with generative AI, what we've seen is a lot of non-technology people now want to be technology people and use it. I think education on the risks is key. We like to say we're building the ship as we are sailing it.

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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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