Suk Kim

Anthropic released a legal plugin for Claude last week. It automates contract review, NDA triage, and compliance workflows - all open-source and customizable to your organization's playbook. I've been testing it out. Here's what stood out: This is foundation work, not a finished product: This handles contract review, but legal teams need approval workflows, version control, e-signatures, and matter management integration. Building that yourself means significant technical resources, ongoing maintenance, and integration work. Yes, it can integrate via MCP, but the difference between this and mature legal operations platforms is established trust, compliance certifications, proven security frameworks, and years of domain expertise baked into workflow design. Legal ops leaders may find that the hidden costs add up quickly. This should worry vendors whose product is Claude wrapped in a nice UI, but end-to-end legal operations platforms with security frameworks, compliance track records, and deep workflow expertise are probably fine. The real opportunity here is what gets built on top of this foundation. I'm genuinely excited to see what in-house legal teams create with this - and how vendors use it as a starting point to build more comprehensive solutions. Open-source foundations like this could accelerate a lot of interesting work in legal tech. #LegalTech #LegalOps #Claude #AI

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What No One Tells You About Building Legal Ops in the Bay Area Legal Ops in the Bay Area isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s fast, complex, and constantly evolving - and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Over the years, I’ve helped build and scale Legal Ops programs through just about every phase of growth - from “we need a process yesterday” to “we need global consistency by next quarter.” Each stage brings a new puzzle to solve. What I’ve learned: success in Legal Ops isn’t about tools or templates - it’s about people. It’s about understanding how teams actually work, designing systems that fit reality, and creating space for Legal to lead with strategy, not just react to risk. I’ve led initiatives that brought structure to scaling startups, built cross-functional trust with Product and BizOps, and turned data into decision-making power. The throughline? Translating complexity into clarity so Legal can drive the business forward. The Bay Area breeds innovation - and Legal Ops is quietly shaping how that innovation stays smart, compliant, and sustainable. That’s the part of this work that keeps me energized every day. #LegalOps #LegalInnovation #BayAreaLegalOps #TechLaw #OpsLeadership #LegalTransformation #bayarea

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As commercial counsels in SaaS, we live in contracts—negotiating terms, managing risk, and ensuring commercial interest is preserved. Yet, one of the most natural expansions is into Product Counsel. Understanding the product—its privacy, security, IP, regulatory compliance, and how it scales, equips you with knowledge and skills to make you a stronger commercial counsel and a more strategic partner to the business. Curious to hear from the community: • For those who’ve bridged from contracts to product advisory in SaaS, what helped make the shift? • How do you start seeing the product from a legal/compliance perspective, beyond the contract? • Any experiences or skills that smoothed the transition? Looking forward to learning from your insights! #SaaS #InHouseCounsel #ProductCounsel #CommercialLaw #Privacy #IP #RegulatoryCompliance #LegalOps #CareerGrowth #LegalCommunity

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2025 LegalTech just flipped the playbook. AI isn’t whispering. It’s rewriting contract review, billing, and legal ops at warp speed. Vendors, your demo doesn’t cut it anymore—delight, don’t just license. Firms, you’re not replacing humans; you’re amplifying them. Cost reductions? Try 99-plus percent and lightning-fast accuracy that humans can’t touch. This isn’t tomorrow—it’s now. #RLLB2025 #LegalTechRevolution #LegalProjectManagement #LegalOps Neil Signore Jennifer (Stephens) Coniglio Jeffrey Brandt Kristin Calve https://lnkd.in/g6aUuqfp

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Today at The L Suite (TechGC) Legal Ops conference in San Jose I had the pleasure of representing Glean and speaking with Sean Lakind of Luminance and a wonderful group of Legal Ops professionals on the topic of "Reimagining Contracting: From Draft to Deal with AI". We discussed using AI to accelerate contracting, prepare legacy data for AI usage, extract post-contracting intelligence from contracts, use agents to accelerate legal workflows and automation, and much more. Legal professionals can use AI to drive speed, efficiency, demonstrate value, and lead change across the whole business. It is time to lean in and step up! See my recent blog on this topic: https://lnkd.in/g4j8HFZK #glean #workplaceAI

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Join me on Nov. 6 for this CLE! My sincerest thanks to the Agiloft team for including me. Here's what I'll be talking about for this session: Drafting outbound contracts with clarity and consistency: ➡️ Using clause libraries and playbooks to make drafting repeatable and low-risk without losing deal speed ➡️ Using AI to surface clause trends and align templates with real-world negotiation outcomes (e.g., which fallback positions actually close deals) ➡️ How concise, outcome-focused drafting decreases ambiguity, accelerates deal speed, and increases customer trust Reviewing inbound agreements faster and more rigorously: ➡️ How AI can assist with triage, through categorizing risk, auto-flagging deviations, and supporting prioritization of review by impact (this is still a work in progress on my side as I build out these capabilities) ➡️ Using AI to track metrics like variance-to-playbook as indicators of reduced contractual risk Maintaining airtight control over obligations to maximize deal value: ➡️ Embedding key terms into self-built workflows so obligations are acted on, not just recorded ➡️ Leveraging post-signature data to improve negotiation strategy and forecast risk exposure across your contract portfolio TL;DR: Clarity enables faster, smarter risk acceptance. Use of AI enables us as lawyers and legal professionals to practice risk management at scale.

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There’s a misconception that enterprise AI tools make outputs fully reliable. Enterprise AI tools reduce some risks, but they don’t replace human review. Stress testing and structured evaluation are still necessary to catch reasoning failures that look polished but misapply the law. #LegalAI #LegalTech #ResponsibleAI

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Wondering what toasters have to do with legal ops? 🍞 You'll have to listen to almost the very end of the latest In-House podcast co-hosted by Jessica Nguyen and Ken Priore with guests yours truly and Krysta Johnson to find out. I promise it's well worth it for all the nuggets of wisdom Krysta and I share about future-proofing your legal department. If that isn't enticing enough, here are a few of my key takeaways: 📊 Legal ops is more strategic & data-driven than ever: The conversation has shifted from "did we save money?" to "how is legal driving business value?" ✨ When it comes to AI, embrace a growth mindset and experimentation: Continuous learning and adaptability are crucial for legal and particularly legal ops professionals 🤝 Strategic hiring and collaboration are key to success: Business is a team sport and hiring the right player who knows that collaboration is the fastest path to winning is essential Check out the podcast in the links in the comments below. Once you listen, drop a comment with 1-2 of your 🔑 takeaways. Happy listening!

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Billable hours shouldn’t fund Ctrl+F. 🐝 InfraHive's AI automates court research, drafting, and clause/data extraction with accuracy front and center. We combine LLMs with proprietary legal NLP, connect to your DMS, eDiscovery, PACER, email, and scanned PDFs, then return evidence-backed answers—citations, clauses, and risk flags you can verify. Deploy private, keep privilege intact, and log every step. Think faster first-pass review, tighter drafts, and fewer late-night “find that clause” fire drills. Precision over page counts. That’s the point.

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In our recent Cassels' webinar, my stellar colleagues Dakota Bundy, Raysa Marcondes, and I covered a wide range of issues that enterprises adopting AI are facing, including the impact of Agentic AI on AI governance, key IP considerations, and global regulatory trends. For more, check the link below.

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Today’s the day! Excited to join other legal leaders at The L Suite (TechGC) 2025 AI Conference here in NYC and co-lead this afternoon's roundtable with Margaret G. of on AI Deployment in Highly Regulated Industries. We’ll be diving into real-world questions that legal teams are grappling with now: ⚖️ Balancing innovation with compliance in AI use cases 📊 Building documentation and audit trails regulators will trust 🌍 Navigating evolving global frameworks like the EU AI Act 🤝 Collaborating across legal, risk, and product to govern AI effectively If you’re in the room, we’re looking forward to your insights. If you’re following along from afar, let us know what you’re thinking about—we’ll keep the conversation going. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eHRcH8D5 #LSuite #AIConference #LegalLeadership #AICompliance #Governance #CorporateCounsel #AIinRegulatedIndustries #ResponsibleAI

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You just spent 9 months and half you annual budget implementing a state-of-the-art Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) system. It has AI, automated workflows, and a sleek dashboard. Unfortunately, your Senior Counsel is still tracking high-priority deals in a private Excel sheet. Your Legal Ops lead is using a personal Trello board to manage the intake. In short, you have a "Shadow Legal" problem. This isn't just an "efficiency problem." It’s a massive security and ethical liability. Shadow systems emerge whenever the perceived effort of using the official tool outweighs the immediate benefit to the user. Lawyers aren't trying to be difficult; they are trying to be fast. But "fast" outside the perimeter is dangerous. When teams move work to consumer-grade project management tools or personal cloud drives, they leave the "Legal Safe Zone." Tools not designed for Legal often lack the granular permissioning required to maintain Attorney-Client Privilege. If a non-legal admin has "Global Access" to a generic Trello board containing legal strategy, you’ve created a discovery nightmare. Moreover, personal spreadsheets and "quick fix" SaaS tools don't have the SOC2 Type II, GDPR, or HIPAA compliance your enterprise requires. Data sitting in a "Shadow" tool is data you can’t govern, can’t delete, and can’t protect during a breach. Probably most problematic on an operational front, if it’s not in the system, it doesn’t exist for reporting. You can't defend your budget or headcount if half your team's "impact" is hidden in a private "To-Do" list. To kill Shadow Legal, you don't need more "mandatory use" memos. You need to reduce friction until the official path becomes the path of least resistance. - Meet them where they live: Integrate your tech directly into Outlook, Gmail, and Word. If they have to leave their email to log a matter, they won't do it. - Only ask for what is strictly necessary on intake. You can enrich the data with AI later—don't make the lawyer do manual data entry at 4:30 PM. - Ensure your official tools automatically handle document retention and permissioning. When the "safe" way is also the "easiest" way, adoption follows. High adoption isn't won with a mandate. It’s won by building a system that respects a lawyer's time and their ethical obligations. If your team is working "in the shadows," look at the friction—before the regulators look at you.

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