How to Drive Value, Build Agility, and Scale Beyond Your Four Walls

Legal teams face unprecedented pressure to adopt artificial intelligence. According to recent industry surveys, while nearly 87% of General Counsel report that their teams are actively using AI, barely half have a formal roadmap for how to roll it out safely and strategically.

The temptation is to draft a rigid, three-year technology plan or buy shiny software and look for ways to force it into daily workflows. But in an environment where AI models evolve almost monthly, static roadmaps quickly become obsolete. To build a defensible AI strategy that earns C-suite buy-in and delivers real ROI, legal leaders need a shift in mindset: stop focusing on the tech, and start focusing on the problems.

In a recent episode of the Data Xposure podcast, Kimberly Harlowe, Senior Director of Litigation Support and Technology at Altria, broke down how corporate legal departments can build an agile, problem-driven AI roadmap that scales from internal low-risk quick wins to massive outside counsel efficiencies.

Here is how you can put that practical framework to work for your team.

Want to hear the full conversation? Listen to Data Xposure Episode: Coaching AI Change with Kimberly Harlowe to dive deeper into leadership, relationship capital, and AI execution.

Pivot from "Tool-First" to "Problem-First" (And Win Over Executives)

When presenting an AI plan to General Counsel or executive leadership, starting with software features is a trap. Executives care about business outcomes: reducing risk, cutting costs, or freeing up head-count for higher-value strategic work. Whenever someone suggests a new legal tech solution, start with the most fundamental question and build from there.

"Somebody comes in my office and says, hey, I've got this great tool that I think can solve all of these problems. Or I have this great tool. Look at all the things it can do. My first question is probably going to be, what's the problem you're trying to solve? There are a lot of tools that can do a lot of things, but if you don't have a specific problem identified that you're trying to solve, I'm not sure that's the right tool for you."

— Kimberly Harlowe, Senior Director of Litigation Support and Technology at Altria

If there’s a clear-cut problem you’re trying to solve, you have a foundation on which you can pitch the solution to executive leadership and gain their buy-in. Key elements of doing that include:

• Defining the Metric Upfront: Frame every AI initiative around either saving significant hard dollars or reclaiming high-value internal capacity.
• Matching Strategy to Risk Tolerance: Assess your leadership’s risk appetite early. If your GC is highly risk-averse, anchor your pitch in low-risk internal knowledge management tools before proposing litigation-facing automation.

Want to share your thoughts on AI? Exterro and EDRM are conducting a survey on AI use by legal departments, and we'd love it if you would participate. We'll be generating a report, so you and other legal teams can assess where you stand relative to your peers on AI adoption.

Design for Agility: Build a Plug-and-Play Architecture

Projecting a multi-year technology stack is nearly impossible when AI solutions shift every six months. If you lock your department into a rigid single-vendor ecosystem, you risk missing out on superior tools down the line. Instead, build an operational environment that allows you to substitute tools out seamlessly.

• Define the Problem Parameters First: Focus on the workflow problem (e.g., “We struggle to keep up with subpoenas.”) rather than the brand name of the software.
• Maintain Modular Infrastructure: Look for solutions that integrate easily with your existing legal operations ecosystem, so you can swap underlying models without breaking the entire process.
• Cultivate Space to Fail: Historically, legal departments penalize mistakes. But testing AI requires creating a safe space where teams can experiment, realize a tool isn't working, learn, and iterate quickly.

Gain Internal Momentum with Low-Risk Wins

If your department is hesitant about AI, start with low-friction, near-zero-risk automation. The goal here isn't massive cost savings overnight; it’s building tech confidence and literacy across your team.

A prime example of a low-risk, high-value win is organizing legacy institutional knowledge. Corporate legal departments sit on thousands of legal memos, outside counsel advisories, and historical filings.

• The Practical Workflow: Use standard enterprise environments (like Microsoft SharePoint) with automated AI fields and prompt triggers.
• The Execution: When outside counsel submits a memo, an automated prompt parses the document, extracts key metadata (firm name, date, core subject matter), and generates a concise two-sentence summary.
• The Business Impact: Your team instantly transforms a chaotic document repository into an easily searchable knowledge base, drastically cutting down the time spent looking for past guidance without introducing external data security risks.

Scale High-Impact Workflows Beyond Your Four Walls

Internal quick wins prove the concept, but corporate legal teams are relatively small. To demonstrate significant ROI to your executive team, you have to look outside your four walls to where the majority of your budget goes: outside counsel spend.

"Your outside counsel are using tools every day and they're really expensive and the hours they're spending are huge. So I'm looking at how I can identify solutions that I can mandate use across multiple firms, because that's where I'm going to get real big bang for the buck.You control what your outside counsel does and how they do it. You have some control over that."

— Kimberly Harlowe

High-impact use cases for outside counsel might include:

• Bespoke Deposition Summaries: Work with key law firms to adopt agentic AI tools that parse hours of deposition transcripts against core litigation issues.
• Written Discovery Drafts: Feed AI tools historical, approved discovery responses to generate first-pass drafts for new matters.
• The Human-in-the-Loop Standard: AI isn't meant to replace associates or partners. It serves to eliminate dozens of manual hours on the front end so legal experts can focus on high-level strategy and precision review.

To maximize savings and reduce operational risk, survey your top law firms to see what tools they are testing. Aligning your outside counsel around standardized AI tools ensures consistency, improves defensibility, and delivers measurable cost reduction back to the business.

Stay ahead of data risk, governance, and legal technology trends. Check out the Data Xposure Podcast for biweekly conversations with industry leaders managing risk across complex corporate environments.

Turning AI Strategy into Daily Action

Bringing AI into your legal department isn't purely a technical challenge; it's a leadership challenge. Success depends on preparing your people, setting clear expectations, and managing high-pressure changes step by step. As Kim Harlowe emphasized, when facing overwhelming tech transformations or tight litigation deadlines, narrow the focus down to the immediate one to three actionable steps. By pairing a problem-first strategy with low-risk internal wins and collaborative outside counsel scaling, legal leaders can move past the hype and build a defensible, highly effective AI program.

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