Build or buy legal GenAI? What you should consider ??

Greetings ??

Tom Dreyfus and Sam Flynn here. We took a mini break! Sam visited family in Europe, while Tom swam with whales in Western Australia, naturally. We're back now, and the team is busy packing for the CLOC (Corporate Legal Operations Consortium) APAC Summit, the region's top legal ops conference, hitting Sydney August 20-21.

At our exclusive solution lab, "Build or buy? Practical answers to the biggest question in legal GenAI today", we're sharing lessons from implementing GenAI tools at some of the biggest companies and law firms around. Tom will be joined by Bupa 's Head of Legal Operations Claire Nuske , and Australian Retirement Trust's Legal Operations wonder Matthew Duncan .?

If you're in Sydney you should totally come! But if you can't make it, there's still time to book a chat with Tom to get the latest 1:1. Learn more about the workshop and/or book a meeting with Tom here.?

For those of you who can’t make it, we wanted to reflect on some Build vs Buy lessons learned from other legal ops superstars over the last year:

?? Mastercard: Small bets, big risk management

In a fireside chat with Mastercard’s Chief Data Officer earlier this year in NYC, Sam learned how these superstars deal with the risk of citizen development: “The solution lies in small bets to find the benefits, but aggregated risk management”. If you buy your team new toys to play with, you need to make sure you set the ground rules too! (This piece from the Harvard Business Review is an insightful deep-dive for those interested!)

?? Engineers don't grow on trees, says the American Arbitration Association

The American Arbitration Association team was reminded of this after comparing an in-house tool against one built on Josef Q earlier this year. A bakeoff between the two taught Chief Innovation Officer Diana Didia that engineers are valuable, finite resources: “As a CIO, you only have so much development bandwidth, and you want to use that bandwidth in the most strategic ways,” Diana said. (This reminded us of Nikki Shaver’s piece (paywall) from last year, where she cautioned firms to only build tools that gave them a “competitive advantage”.)

?? It pays to question IT, says adidas and Orrick Labs

Echoing Diana, adidas Director of Legal Solutions Alex Herrity and Director of Orrick Labs Vedika Mehera reminded Sam and an audience in London of the value in questioning IT. If they say they can build it themselves, ask them how, by when, and with what limitations. We’re seeing people make the same mistakes time and again. Alex and Vedika’s advice? Only when IT answers those questions directly can you actually make an informed decision.

What works for your business? Build… or buy?

Tom & Sam

Our stakeholders are very tech-savvy. Outside of work, they're used to accessing information in real-time, so with AI and our other automation projects, we try to replicate this in a professional setting.

Nicola Packer , General Counsel - Fnatic