7 Tips: 200+ Tech and Legal Experts Weigh in on AI, Governance, and ROI
This article, written by Shashi Angadi, CTO at Exterro, originally appeared in Law.com in October.
Defensibility cannot be a reactive fire drill. It must be built into workflows, cross-functional governance, and even budget planning.
The legal profession has always been about judgment. But judgment must be backed by process, documentation, and proof that every decision can withstand regulatory or judicial scrutiny.
This requirement has given rise to a new operational mandate: defensibility must move from a theoretical aspiration to a daily discipline. And it’s more than just legal teams who should be involved. The XChange 2025 conference in Denver explored a central question facing every general counsel and compliance officer: How can defensibility become measurable, repeatable, and cost-effective?
The consensus was clear. Defensibility cannot be a reactive fire drill. It must be built into workflows, cross-functional governance, and even budget planning.
Here are seven tips (or best practices) heard at Exterro’s XChange event, for operationalizing defensibility and transitioning from fulfilling a compliance requirement to gaining a competitive advantage.
1. Build Defensible Automation
Building defensible automation starts with logging every decision. While AI can dramatically reduce burdensome review, its output must be explainable and defensible in court or before regulators.
Legal teams and tech experts should start small with high-volume, low-risk tasks such as FOIA redactions, legal hold notices, or complaint intake. They should require vendors to provide regulator-ready audit trails and guarantee that customer data isn’t used to train models. They should also run parallel attorney-only and AI-assisted workflows to validate outcomes before scaling.
2. Treat Governance as a Daily Discipline
Defensibility extends beyond technology and depends on governance that evolves with changing regulations, risks, and data landscapes. Hilltop Securities, for example, created a cross-functional governance council including legal, privacy, security, and IT, unifying multiple business units under one platform.
Enterprise teams can follow this model by formalizing a governance council with quarterly reviews of policies, retention schedules, and playbooks. This will allow the team to map workflows to frameworks like GDPR, CPRA, and DOJ guidance and automate report generation so regulator-ready documentation is produced as part of routine operations.
3. Use Collaboration as Risk Reduction
No investigation, breach response, or discovery project succeeds in isolation. Legal, IT, privacy, and forensics teams must operate as a unit. Clear role definition and cross-team exercises are critical.
Teams and their technical counterparts should adopt RACI project management models to specify who is responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed for each workflow step. They should also conduct tabletop exercises at least twice a year to stress-test processes and centralize technology platforms to maintain chain of custody and reduce discovery risks.
4. Make Cost Savings Repeatable
Defensibility is not just a legal shield. It can also drive measurable business value. Rockwell Automation standardized global workflows and used its e-discovery stack to defensibly delete risky data, reduce hosting costs, and improve preservation processes.
Legal and tech teams can replicate this approach by tracking metrics such as hosting costs, review hours, and outside counsel spend per matter. This will standardize workflows and codify lessons to replicate savings across future matters and regions, and it will establish benchmarks to demonstrate ROI to the C-suite.
5. Turn Compliance Into a Competitive Advantage
Mature compliance programs build trust with boards, investors, and customers, while certification programs and internal training elevate team expertise that adds value to ESG reporting, M&A due diligence, or customer audits.
Legal teams and tech experts should integrate defensibility metrics into reporting frameworks and external audits, turning every investigation or regulatory response into a learning opportunity for policy and playbook updates, and offering staff certification to strengthen internal expertise and credibility.
6. Move From Talking Points to Dashboard Metrics
Defensibility should no longer reside solely in policy manuals or slide decks. It must be measurable and reportable alongside spend, matter velocity, and risk exposure.
Legal and tech teams can track defensibility as a key metric in board reports alongside other operational KPIs and use dashboards to monitor AI-assisted workflows, governance compliance, and cost efficiency.
7. Embed Defensibility Across the Organization
Operationalizing defensibility completely changes legal from a cost center into a strategic partner, helping cross-functional teams avoid sanctions while building trust, efficiency, and enterprise value.
Legal and tech pros should integrate explainable automation, living governance, cross-functional collaboration, repeatable cost savings, and proactive reporting into daily operations. They should also embed defensibility into the organization’s culture and operational rhythm. Every matter should be treated as an opportunity to improve processes, strengthen compliance, and generate measurable business impact.
Defensibility needs to be a daily discipline. Legal and tech teams that embed AI-assisted automation, adaptive governance, and measurable cost efficiencies not only to mitigate risk, but also earn a seat at the table by turning compliance into a competitive advantage.
by Shashi Angadi
Shashi Angadi has served as Exterro CTO for nearly two decades, building an end-to-end platform for enterprises and their outside counsel to holistically manage data governance, risk and compliance processes. Before Exterro, he was a solutions architect at U.S. Bank and a consultant at Fujitsu.