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Calfee Intellectual Property Partner Bradley S. Pulfer sat down with in-house counsel to discuss corporate legal department considerations related to generative AI policies, including cross-functional collaboration with an organization’s legal department, CISO and CTO. The discussion touched on key considerations for corporate legal departments when developing critical policies and practices governing the implementation of generative AI.

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 the corporate legal department considerations for policies related to implementing generative AI?

Georgia Yanchar:

I think, fairly quickly, put together a policy on use of generative AI. So specifically, as to generative AI, just telling all of our employees how they can and can't use generative AI. And our policy basically has two aspects.

First off, what can you put into the tool? And my general guidance is unless it's a license that you're paying for, right, then assume that whatever you're putting into it, you are shouting publicly in a parking lot to the world, right? You don't have an expectation of privacy. You cannot put personal information or client information of any type into it unless you've asked the legal department if it's OK, and there's an enterprise license where you have some expectation of confidentiality around that. So that's as to what you put into it.

As to what you do with the output, think of it like a tool. In general, if you're creating something, you're letting something create content for you, fine for creating an internal email, but you need to be much more careful if you're using the output to go into something client-facing or to go into a product, and that always needs to come to legal for a review. And then when things come to legal for a review, we will go through, first you go through negotiating the price. Make sure you got approval for that. But then it goes to the information security team to look at it from a data security, how are they protecting the data, securing the data that goes into it, segregating the data? Are they using it to train their models, looking at all the information security around the tool? And then it comes to legal to look at data privacy laws, data privacy compliance, making sure that, you know, the legal and the allocations of risks are okay.

Bonnie Smith:

We, as soon as this big boom started in probably November 2022, whenever ChatGPT came out, it was immediately kind of, we locked it down everywhere. We blocked access to ChatGPT, all the big public interfaces.

We formed a cross-functional, cross-business council within Rockwell. It's made up of attorneys, it's made out of CISO representatives, our CTO, basically everyone that has different perspectives from across the company. And we are tracking all use cases across the company, which is a feat, but most of those cases fall into a lot of internal use.

We have our internal sandbox, which has a Rockwell-controlled version of GPT. So, for most people that want a productivity tool, but they still want to use Rockwell confidential information, they can use this tool safely within our environment, and we're not concerned about it.

For a lot of the third-party vendor tools, they have to come through this council. So, we have this team that tries to make those decisions at a lower level. I do think there become some questions that get bumped up to our executive level, the business people, and it's really the appetite for risk, right? If we have a new vendor tool where, I don't know, the security architecture, we haven't really vetted that yet, it's a newer startup that's doing this tool. and there's a team that really wants to use it, you know, what is our risk appetite for that? That's not necessarily our decision. We try to kick that up to let our senior leaders decide that.

But typically, I think that our goal is to track where the use is. So, for coding, we have all of our developers, they have to annotate their code, say this portion was generated by AI. So that, God forbid, if something happened in the law, we would need to be able to go and find where that was, rip it out if we had to. So that's kind how we're tackling 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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