CorporateLegal.tech

A sales rep pings you on Slack. A VP forwards a 40-message email thread with "thoughts?" Someone from HR stops you in the hallway. Procurement drops a contract in a shared folder and tells no one. Every legal team knows this chaos, and every one of those requests is invisible to reporting, impossible to prioritize, and too scattered to automate. The fix has a name: the legal front door.

Your outside counsel told you all about their AI strategy at the last relationship dinner. They have a platform, an innovation team, and a very nice slide. Then the invoices arrived, and they looked exactly like last year's, only with higher rates. You're not imagining it. The data says most in-house teams haven't seen AI savings yet, and fixing that is a data and pricing problem you can actually solve.

AI notetakers are the most successful shadow IT in corporate history. They join calls uninvited, transcribe every aside, and helpfully email a summary to attendees who may not have been on the call. A new lawsuit filed this month shows how that "helpful" summary can become evidence. Legal teams need a policy, a technical fix, and a retention plan, preferably before the next all-hands.

Somewhere in your company right now, an employee is pasting a sensitive email thread into a free AI chatbot and asking, "Is this a problem legally?" In February, a federal judge in New York made clear that exchange may be discoverable. For in-house teams, this isn't a hypothetical anymore. It's a gap in your controls, and it has a fix.

Remember when legal only saw software purchases at the contract stage? Those days are gone. Every department now wants AI, every AI tool touches data, and every data question lands on legal's desk. In-house counsel has become the de facto gatekeeper for enterprise software, and the job comes with a choice: be the gate everyone waits at, or the gate that makes buying safer and faster.