Giving GCs a voice, and a reason to rejoice
At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, I’ve always believed that GCs are the forgotten leaders of enterprise tech. There are a few factors that contribute to this dynamic, not the least of which is a very real human aspect — those of us outside the legal profession tend to fear it to some degree, in the same way we fear going to the dentist or the doctor. Rarely do you get good news from a lawyer, right? If you received an unexpected letter in the mail on a legal firm’s letterhead, it probably wasn’t sent to congratulate you on being so ridiculously good looking. Dollars to donuts, you’re getting sued or some bill has gone into collections. The result, unsurprisingly, is that the legal world brings with it a significant degree of reactionary anxiety for the majority of people.
But I believe the reason that corporate legal leaders haven’t had their voice heard extends beyond that human anxiety, and into the technologies our industry creates. For much of the past two decades, advances in technology have been focused heavily on the cloud and SaaS — two technologies that have revolutionized work for pretty much every group represented in enterprise tech except legal.
Beyond its most basic applications, like document sharing, the cloud has done almost nothing to increase productivity or eliminate repetitive work for legal teams. Similarly, SaaS vendors have tried and failed to create tools that add real value for legal teams, either because they don’t understand the inherent complexities of the work or because they’ve attempted to retrofit an existing technology to those complex needs.
But there’s good news on the horizon for this group, a massive opportunity for uplift in the operational productivity of their teams, driven by AI. Unlike SaaS and the cloud, the potential impact of AI is not limited to a specific set of people or functions. It’s an advancement with the potential to revolutionize every aspect of the enterprise, and legal is very much included this time around.
And because the last technological revolution passed legal professionals by, to some degree, they’re about to get an upgrade equivalent to trading in your Model T for a self-driving car. As an industry, we can finally deliver tools that allow for faster contract negotiation, faster review cycles, more efficient and productive case search, transcription, drafting – all of these manual and repetitive tasks that create the impression of legal as a blocker and cost center because they simply seem to take so much time, resource and effort. If, that is, founders in this space tackle the problem with an acute understanding of what legal teams need and why.
To give us more perspective on the challenges legal teams face and how AI-driven technologies can help address those challenges, I reached out to some of the most well-respected GCs and legal leaders in the industry. And yes we have had a few GC Group Therapy Dinners where I listened intently. Here’s what they had to say.
The opportunity to help in meaningful ways is enormous.
“The biggest challenge I see GCs face is motivating and engaging teams through burnout. Most corporate lawyers are doing the work of two or three people, intensifying this struggle. I firmly believe innovation is the way forward—we must modernize the legal profession to gain efficiencies in repetitive tasks that lead to burnout. Equally important and often overlooked is teaching lawyers how to manage stress effectively. While tech drives efficiency, building resilience and adaptability is foundational for long-term success.”
- Charlotte Smith, Founder of Level7 Legal, Legal EdTech & Executive Coach
“My biggest challenge has always been the sheer volume and randomness of incoming requests on any given day. Each new communication tool is another channel to monitor. Requests are coming through different platforms, from every group within the organization. It’s a cacophony that is hard to handle.”
- Kevin Keller, Head of Legal at Adept
“GCs are often pulled in a million different directions. We want to find ways to eliminate repetitive tasks from our workload. If I could just figure out a way to offload low-value contracts alone, that would be huge. Or, a bot built to automatically respond to questions that have already been answered for someone else within the organization.”
- Nisha Antony, former deputy GC at Reddit
“The low-hanging fruit use case for legal is very similar to HR or IT – eliminating repetitive, simple everyday questions by automating the responses. Being a GC is like being a school teacher in a class full of kids constantly raising their hands. It becomes difficult to teach the lesson.”
- Gisu Sadaghiani, former General Counsel at Visby
“GCs are being asked to do more with less. We are acutely aware that we’re considered a cost center, and are always looking for ways to become more efficient. For example, when new laws are put into place around AI and other areas — how do we stay on top of that and provide relevant advice in real-time?”
- Megha Sharma, General Counsel at Uniphore Technologies
User experience tailored to legal teams is critical to adoption.
“As a legal practitioner, you want something automated, something streamlined, something consistent — but it also has to be dynamic enough to move with the business. Plug and play doesn’t always work for the legal function – we need to be able to customize, to update on the fly as laws or circumstances change. That’s where AI can really help, is with those dynamic changes.”
- Megha Sharma
"At many companies, legal teams are asked to leverage productivity tools meant for other groups - like engineering teams. At best this adds to the cognitive burden on the legal team, who has to create new (and often inefficient) approaches to intake and processing in order to align with a tool. At worst, the members of your legal team spend time and energy creating workarounds for what is a flawed/mismatched tool for their purposes.”
- Kevin Keller
“I think generally, legal teams don’t like new technology. But we’re also like everyone else – we will use whatever tech helps us do our jobs faster. There are so many demands on our time that experimenting with the latest and greatest tech is not a priority for most of us. But if a piece of technology can demonstrably help us be faster and more efficient, we’ll invest the time it takes to learn and use the tool. Of course, it really needs to work, and reliably. We don’t have the time or technical expertise to fix bugs.”
- Nisha Antony
Recommended by LinkedIn
“The more user-friendly and human-centric the platform, the higher the adoption rate—and the clearer the value becomes.”
- Charlotte Smith
Legal teams need tools built to augment their expertise, not replace it.
“In the legal world, it’s difficult to find a generalist. When we get out of law school, we’re asked to specialize. There’s so much tribal knowledge in our profession that it’s hard to transfer everything to a platform.”
- Gisu Sadaghiani
“The future isn’t about AI taking over—it's about AI amplifying human expertise and working seamlessly together.”
- Charlotte Smith
Deliver tools that can demonstrate value to a diverse set of audiences, and you’ll sell more effectively.
“People understand issues at different levels. If we could tailor messages more effectively to each audience, it would be extremely valuable.”
- Nisha Antony
“Legal teams have to fight for budget, even when we know a tool can be helpful. For vendors building legal tech, if you can create a pitch that is also selling to the CFO or CEO in a way that clearly articulates the value to the organization at large, it’s much easier to get a foot in the door. It’s important for tech to have an interface that the CEO and CFO can relate to.”
- Kevin Keller
“Legal and the legal function might be well understood within a large company, or by executives who have a lot of experience in the enterprise. But for smaller companies, where execs and employees don’t have as much experience with the legal function — the dynamics are less familiar, less established and we need a tool that understands and addresses those dynamics.”
- Megha Sharma
Build a solution that speaks multiple languages, but is fluent in legal.
“Legal is a gray area, if it wasn’t, you wouldn’t need lawyers. Statutes are vague, court decisions can be interpreted in different and unexpected ways, and trying to distill that all down for people who aren’t lawyers is incredibly challenging, especially when you have to then give practical, concrete advice on what to do next and why. The further you are from the law, the harder it is for a layperson to understand the implications of what a lawyer or law firm is saying. We need something that provides a translation function.”
- Nisha Antony
“We are the kings and queens of the thesaurus. For example, one team might use the phrase ‘change of control’ while another uses ‘change in control’ to mean the exact same thing. We need technology that doesn’t simply identify a specific clause, but can decipher the meaning behind it regardless of how it is written.”
- Megha Sharma
“For the more sophisticated partners to legal – like sales, supply chain partners, R&D – this is where the complex questions come in and legal really needs to be a partner.”
- Gisu Sadaghiani
Global Legal Executive | Ex-Amazon | Ex-Meta
4wIt was such a pleasure working with you Yousuf Khan. Looking forward to more collaborations to come.
Debt Finance Lead - Middle East (Project Finance, Islamic Finance, Acquisition Finance, Event Driven Finance)
1moYou would have made a great GC yourself!
Thank you Yousuf Khan for all your support, and fellow GCs on shining a light on how much we care about and impact the whole enterprise, as well as the challenges/solutions.
Empowering Legal Leaders to Build Thriving, High-Performing Teams | Founder | Builder | Former Lawyer | Certified Executive Coach
1moThank you for all your support this year! I’m excited for 2025, riding the wave of transformation in legal! 🏄♀️
Co-founder at Atolio
1moI'm sure Cecilia Ziniti has a point of view here