Coaching AI Change: Kimberly Harlowe on Trust, Risk, and Legal Innovation | Data Xposure - Ep 19

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Host: Mike Hamilton, VP, Marketing - Exterro

Guest: Kimberly Harlowe, Senior Director, Litigation Support and Technology - Altria

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AI strategy in legal operations is not just a technology decision. It is a leadership challenge, one that requires trust, discipline, and the ability to bring the right teams along.

In this episode of Data Xposure, brought to you by Exterro, Kimberly Harlowe, Senior Director, Litigation Support and Technology at Altria, shares how her passion for coaching basketball has shaped her approach to leadership, team dynamics, and innovation. She explains why relationship capital matters when legal, IT, security, business units, and outside counsel are asked to move quickly under pressure.

Kim also explores how legal leaders can evaluate AI with a measured strategy: balancing ROI with risk, using smaller proofs of concept to test value, and communicating clearly with senior leadership. Listeners will come away with a practical view of how to coach teams through change, challenge the status quo, and adopt AI without losing sight of defensibility, trust, and control.

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Episode Transcript

Mike Hamilton (00:08)

Welcome to Data Xposure brought to you by Exterro the podcast for legal, privacy, compliance, and security professionals managing risk across today's complex data environments. AI is moving fast. Legal teams are being asked to move faster. But for leaders responsible for litigation support, discovery, technology, and governance, the real question is not just: can we use AI? It is how do we bring people along, prove value, manage risk?

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It still protect the business. This is where today's guest brings a different kinds of lens.

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Kimberly Harlowe is Senior Director Litigation Support and Technology at Altria. Her work sits at the intersection of legal operations, technology, cross-functional collaboration, and risk management. But one of the most important influences on her leadership style comes from outside the corporate world, coaching basketball. For Kim, coaching is not just a passion, it is a leadership philosophy.

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It's about preparation, trust, knowing your players, building confidence, and helping teams perform when the pressure is high. and in an era where legal departments are being asked to evaluate AI, challenge the status quo, and deliver measurable value without creating new exposure, that coaching mindset may be more important than ever. Today we will talk with Kim about how legal leaders can build relationship capital before they need it.

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How to approach AI strategy with discipline instead of hype, and why successful innovation depends as much on people as it does on technology. Here's our conversation with Kimberly Harlowe

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Mike Hamilton (01:41)

Kim, thank you so much for joining us here today on data xposure

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Kim Harlowe (01:45)

I'm happy to be here. Thank you for the invite.

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Mike Hamilton (01:48)

it's pleasure having you on. You're one of our greatest customers, I would say. Just from a how you influence our customer base and educate others, it's really nice to have you on so you can share some of your expertise.

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Kim Harlowe (02:00)

I appreciate it, thank you. I'll buy you a lunch later for the compliment.

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Mike Hamilton (02:03)

Yeah, I guess. You run litigation sport and technology at Altria. You also coach basketball, and that's some of the things that we were talking about in this pre-show prep was the synergies between those two things and how coaching basketball helped you learn how to lead people. Do you mind talking a little more about that?

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Kim Harlowe (02:26)

Yeah,

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yeah, I'm happy to. I think I have a really unique background. I have a master's in sports leadership and sports management that generally doesn't lead to a litigation career, but it certainly did in my circumstances. And so I've had an opportunity to study leadership I've spent a lot of time that people haven't necessarily had an opportunity to be able to do. In addition, some of my very dear friends for decades

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are former division one coaches in various sports, lacrosse, field hockey, basketball. One is one of national championship in lacrosse. I've had a chance to really learn from them, not just in an academic environment, but in a casual friendly way and take up some tips and tricks from them that I can bring to the work environment. The reality is people are people and it doesn't matter what your work environment is. If you're on a court, if you're on a field, if you're

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Mike Hamilton (02:59)

wow.

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Kim Harlowe (03:18)

sitting at a desk in an office with your colleagues or in a remote office. At the end of the day, we're all looking for really similar things. And some of those skills I think translate really, really well.

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Mike Hamilton (03:30)

Do you mind giving me an example about how you've applied that? So give me a specific if you don't mind, a moment where what you did on the court or on the field is exactly what you've had to do at work.

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Kim Harlowe (03:43)

Yeah, sure. So I actually chatted with one of my friends earlier this week, in anticipation of this call. And I said, hey, I'm going to have to use you as an example here. One of the things that she taught me really early in my career is this concept of you build up money in the bank. Every day you show up as a coach or a player, as a leader in a business organization or as an employee, and you

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commit to the team and your everyday you come and you work hard and you commit to the team and the goals of the team you're making investments in the bank

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So every day you do that, you make a deposit in the bank. Sometimes we're all gonna need to take a withdrawal. We all need a day. Maybe something comes up in your personal life that's really important you have to take care of. Maybe you're really stressed about something and you just need to sort of take a reset. If everybody on your team knows you're committed, it's really easy to...

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accept those things. I'll give you a real life example though. I just did a lot of talking. Here's an example. Whether you're in a really big game or whether you're meeting a really insane litigation deadline, there's something that both of those things have in common. They both can feel incredibly overwhelming because you need to perform in that very stressful environment. And so the approach that I've taken both as a coach of a team and a

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coach of my team at Altria is to help the folks in that position, that overwhelmed position, figure out how to manage it. And so what I do is I say, okay, well, what's the immediate problem and what are the one to three things that we need to focus on right now? What are the first things you have to do? And if you take something that's really broad and overwhelming and you can narrow it down to something that's really actionable and targeted, suddenly it's not so overwhelming.

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And when you get through that moment, then you will get, well, what are the next three things we have to do? And you break them down into plays or you break them down into tasks or smaller segments. And suddenly you're not tackling something that's bigger than you are. You're tackling something that's really within reach.

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Mike Hamilton (05:48)

It's almost like that analogy of one play at a time.

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Kim Harlowe (05:52)

100%. 100%.

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Mike Hamilton (05:55)

And when I was thinking about this conversation that you and I, Kim, were gonna have, it brought me back to one of my best friends. He made a speech at one of our friends' wedding and he said, Show me your friends and I'll show you your future. And this was from a this was a quote from a Phil Jackson book, the the the great coach, NBA coach. And I wanted to ask you about that. In a corporate legal department.

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How much of leading well is just choosing who you surround yourself with before you ever even need them?

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Kim Harlowe (06:29)

that's a huge piece of it. So early in my career, I surrounded myself with an unlikely friend in some ways. She was a senior leader in the finance organization, completely separate from mine. but she was a, highly respected female leader in the organization that had been there longer than me. had more tenure and she had more experiences than I did. she has since retired. We're still great friends.

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But the things that I learned from her were tremendous because she had experiences I hadn't had a chance to have yet. My career was too junior and too young. I have a gentleman that I worked with from day one. He was there when I started. I would now tell you he's my brother. He is on his way to visit me this weekend with his wife and kids. They are our niece and nephews. They're family.

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I'm an only child, so I picked my family. So I think there's an awful lot of truth to that. We had a similar work ethic, a similar approach to the work. We differed on certain things and had some healthy arguments, which is what family does. But I think the people that you surround yourself, they are gonna reflect very much on you and they're very much gonna influence who you are and how you approach the things that are stacked in front of you.

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Mike Hamilton (07:43)

I want to kind of question the coaching metaphor just a little bit. Does that coaching metaphor break down at all? Are there things that a senior director at Altria can't do or wouldn't apply?

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Kim Harlowe (07:58)

I don't think they do. There's another quote, and I'm not sure who it can be attributed to. I've heard that it's Teddy Roosevelt, but I've heard other names thrown out as well. Pat Summitt, a famous basketball coach, used this quote throughout her career. People don't care how much you know. They care about how much you care. And so for me, it's all centered around caring. I care about the results that we attain on a basketball court or

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Mike Hamilton (08:15)

Mm.

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Kim Harlowe (08:25)

whether or not we meet this e-discovery deadline. But I care about the people in the process. so if you can combine those two things, that's a recipe for success. People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. It never breaks down.

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Mike Hamilton (08:42)

That that's a really good point. in my experience, and I don't know if you've experienced this as well, is people can show caring in a lot of different ways. really getting behind what caring or what showcasing caring is, I think is really important as well. Because maybe I get really anxious in stressful situations, but it's showcasing to me that I care. But to someone else, it may showcase well.

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Why are they being a roadblock? Did you ever experience that as well?

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Kim Harlowe (09:11)

I think that's why getting to know people is important, whether it's people within your legal organization or your IT organization or anything. If you don't know someone well, it's really easy to misinterpret. If you are willing to build a relationship, you understand more about what drives people in different ways and you understand their reactions and it's no longer something personal. Instead, it's, they're feeling stressed.

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let me adjust how I'm responding, because that's not the reaction I was trying to elicit. Let me step back and readjust. If I don't understand that, I don't know to readjust. And I don't know that the person sitting on the other side of the table for me is looking for something different. So I do think caring looks different for different people. And understanding what drives people and what motivates people, I think is part of what helps you get there.

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Mike Hamilton (10:02)

You describe it as making deposits in a relationship bank before you need a withdrawal. Give me a deposit you made that paid off months later.

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Kim Harlowe (10:11)

So I can maybe give one with, I'll give an Xtero one. I don't think it's unique to Exterro I've had this same example with various vendors, but I certainly have had it with you all. I try to really understand people. I know all of the folks that I interrupt with regularly. I know the names of their kids.

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I know the things that they're interested in. I know the vacations they've had. know where they grew up, whatever, right? I want to know people. And so I've invested in Extero to develop those relationships. It doesn't matter how great a software is, how great a vendor is, you can put any name you want in the box. It's going to happen where there's a hiccup and something doesn't go as planned. As perfect as you are, you're always going to have that.

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And usually when it does, your client is pretty unhappy and they come at you in a pretty stressed, reactive way. I think I have done that. But the folks on the extero side or the other vendor side have been fairly gracious because they know that it's not personal. I'm not upset with them. This isn't about them. It's about I'm in a spot where I'm uncomfortable with where we're sitting. I want to be in a different place. How do we identify the problem?

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and solve the problem. And they're just more patient with me. I think they understand that I really just want to solve the problem rather than I'm not attacking them. And if I hadn't invested the relationship, it probably would have been a little bit different. And I think how they responded to me would have been different.

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Mike Hamilton (11:38)

Let me flip it on its head a little bit. What does it actually cost when you skip that part though? When legal only shows up on a Friday with a deadline and a request, what does that cost you and your team?

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Kim Harlowe (11:51)

So maybe I'm gonna answer it backwards. What does it cost you to build the relationship? Zero. It is zero cost. You're just kind and you treat people like human beings rather than a number that is providing a service. It costs you zero. If you don't do it, it could cost you a deadline because maybe the folks are frustrated at your response. Maybe they're frustrated with your frustration. They don't know how to respond to that.

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Mike Hamilton (11:56)

Yeah.

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Kim Harlowe (12:19)

they are unwilling to give you the space and grace that you really are looking for. They don't prioritize you over something else that's on your list because they don't understand how important this problem is to you. And so they take it in line of how they've received things. And so to me, there's no cost in making the relationships and making the investment.

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There could be really significant costs in potentially missing a deadline or not getting the right quality of work to meet the deadline that you were hoping for.

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Mike Hamilton (12:50)

One thing that stands out to me, we can talk about communication, collaboration, we should sh be showing an interest. Are there techniques that queue in your head that could be tangible for listeners that they could leverage that could be Hey, I need to turn this on. This is something I need to remember so I can build that bank.

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Kim Harlowe (13:09)

I think it's if you were, how can you create an environment? How can you develop a relationship where you'd be comfortable sitting in front of somebody and having dinner with them for an hour? How would you be able to carry on a conversation? If you invest two minutes at the beginning of a call, you and I did that today. We talked about things outside of work for the couple minutes before we started this conversation. It doesn't take a big investment of time. It's over time.

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It's small little investments over time. Here's a trick that I use and I've encouraged others at Altree to do the same. We use Microsoft Teams as our communication platform and Microsoft Teams will identify who's available. Are you in a call? Are you away or are you green? Are you available? And I have all of the folks that I interact with regularly on my speed dial so that I can look at any point in time. If a call finishes five minutes early, who's green? And I'm just going to give them a call.

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and check in, not about work. You're gonna talk about work when you need to talk about work, but how about what's going on? Hey, I know your grandson applied to college. Has he made a choice yet? What are the finalists? What are you thinking? How's everybody feeling? Is he anxious about going? Time's ticking, He's probably getting ready to go in August. Those are the things that are going on in people's lives every day that are really important to them.

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And so if you can see and care and acknowledge the things that are important to them outside of work, the benefits for you inside work are huge. So just find five minutes, find somebody that's green and give them a call and check in on something. And it's really easy because if you do this routinely, you know the things that are important to them at any given point in time.

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Mike Hamilton (14:44)

That's a great tip. And especially in our hybrid work environment when so many people are working from home, you don't have that water cooler talk, That casual one on one conversation. I need to do more of that with people outside of my department. So that's that's gonna take away.

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Kim Harlowe (14:58)

Yeah, it means you be more purposeful,

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Instead of the, I'm gonna casually run into you and it'll just happen. You have to be really purposeful about making the opportunity for those conversations.

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Mike Hamilton (15:09)

I'm gonna switch gears a little bit, but this will apply to the meat of this conversation, which is around AI and how to manage AI with discipline within the legal space. I did some research before this call, Kim, and I looked at a variety of different stats and surveys. One survey said that 87% of general counsel now report their teams using AI, which is up forty-four percent from a year ago. But barely half

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of them have a formal roadmap for using it. How accurate or representative based on your experience is this? Is this the reality that legal teams are facing right now?

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Kim Harlowe (15:49)

I think the business

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is requiring and mandating that you look at ways to modernize and accelerate how work is getting done. I think that is coming from the C-suite across the board to the entire organization at most companies. And so I think that that piece is the general councils are being expected to report out on use of some tool. And they probably are trying to find something that they can highlight and focus on.

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But I think that it's hard to have a roadmap today, if I want to be fair to these senior leaders. Technology is literally changing by the month. so projecting and predicting what a roadmap looks like for the next one year to three years, is really a challenge because the technology solutions that are out there are changing so rapidly that it's hard to keep up. It's almost as if your roadmap has to shift between

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a very tactical and specific technology solve and instead look at what the problems are that you're trying to solve. What are the problems that I think are the top three that I need to look at and what the solution is, who knows, It'll depend when you get to that one of three. And you've got to try to create solutions in a way that allow you to substitute things out. you got to be really careful not to get too locked in to one.

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AI solution because in six months there could be something better. And so how do you create an environment that allows you to plug and play a little bit? You you set the parameters of what's this thing I'm trying to solve, but if I see something that's a little better, how do I create an environment that allows me to be agile and nimble enough to shift?

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Mike Hamilton (17:19)

Yeah.

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that's one of the bigger problems with AI right now. You get a tool, you think, I can do all this great stuff with it, but what to your point, what am I actually gonna do with it? you could do ten million things with it, but what's actually gonna provide business value and where do you wanna go? So what's Yeah. go, go ahead.

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Kim Harlowe (17:41)

So here's a different way of looking at it. And I may interrupt you, you

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made me think of this. 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?

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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. So that would be my very first question to them is to try to narrow down to the problem. And I think it's, trying to find the problem that will save you a lot of money or save you a lot of time. The chances of you doing both of those, maybe, maybe not. that's a great solution if you can do both.

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But I think leaders would be happy if either, if the problem you're trying to solve is either one of those things. I can save a whole lot of money or I can create a lot of opportunity to use headcount in a different way.

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Mike Hamilton (18:39)

And for you personally, what are those business outcomes, those legal outcomes that you envision AI being able to harness and make more effective, more efficient, more defensible? Are there examples that you've seen in your own experience that stand out?

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Kim Harlowe (18:57)

So I might want to highlight one that's really simple. I think it's important to highlight simple because it goes back to where we started. Sometimes people can feel overwhelmed with an environment. think AI is an environment that makes people feel overwhelmed, particularly if you're not as technically savvy. And so maybe you need to start with something that's fairly basic, probably almost as close to zero risk as you can get.

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but allows you to get a foot in the door and start to build your confidence that you can use it another way. So this is one example. If you were a Microsoft environment and you use SharePoint, there are these things called auto fields and you can create a prompt to fill an auto field. So you have a document, maybe you have a memo from outside council and you want to identify the subject of the memo, the date of the memo, the firm that drafted it and a

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couple sentence summary so that you could store that in your knowledge management system and you can retrieve things a lot faster. We all have lots of documents, lots of legacy historical information, but how can I put my hands on that stuff quickly? That's a pretty low risk scenario that could create a lot of efficiency for your department to be able to find that one document they're looking for a whole lot faster. So that may be one that people aren't as scared of. It can go anywhere from that

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to what's a giant repeatable thing that I'm doing either internally or with my outside counsel. a lot of times people are looking for internal solutions, but you may have a fairly small department. And so maybe the efficiency gain isn't gonna be impactful to your general counsel when he looks at the results. But your outside counsel are using tools every day and they're really expensive and the hours they're spending are huge.

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So I'm looking at how I can identify solutions that I can mandate use across multiple firms, because that's where I'm gonna get real big bang for the buck. And so I would encourage people to look outside their four walls. You control what your outside counsel does and how they do it. You have some control over that. And so maybe there's a sort of bespoke deposition summary tool, that's really specific to your litigation.

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Mike Hamilton (21:00)

Mm-hmm.

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Kim Harlowe (21:11)

Or maybe there's a bespoke tool that you can develop to help with written discovery because you can feed it responses that you've used over time to help inform an initial draft of one that your outside council is doing. It's not the end product. It's not gonna be the end work product and it doesn't get rid of the associates and partners that are working on it, but it could save them many, many hours on the front end to get to the final work product later on.

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So those to me are the two extremes.

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Mike Hamilton (21:41)

Those are great examples. can I conclude from that that you're having frequent conversations with outside council about how they're leveraging AI?

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Kim Harlowe (21:49)

yes, it's critical. And so I've chosen, I can't meet with everybody. We use a lot of outside law firms, but there are a couple that are really key firms that do a significant amount of work for us. And I have engaged with them to have conversations around what's your philosophy on AI as a law firm? How is your general counsel seeing AI? How do they view AI as being relevant in the work that they do?

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are use cases of AI that you're using for other clients, because maybe I can learn from what other clients are doing and figure out how to apply them to us. And what are the things that we could, how could we apply those and what are the things you think we should be doing? And it's important to survey across the firms because again, if you're investing in a tool, you'd like for all of your firms to be using the exact same tool. It reduces risk, it reduces inconsistency, and it maximizes potential savings of time and money.

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And those conversations are really important. And if your outside counsel are involved in those conversations to identify what are the one to three things that you could focus on, they're much more likely to be supporters of that because it's something that they think is useful that they've been a part of identifying and developing along with you.

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Mike Hamilton (22:52)

I like it.

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It was interesting this morning. I got an email from law.com, and there was this new study that they covered from harmonic security. They classified almost two million AI sessions across enterprises. What surprised me was legal and governance came out as the number one department by AI usage. That's ahead of sales, ahead of engineering. And from being in this industry, I know you've been in this industry for a long time.

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Everyone calls as slow to adapt technology. Are you surprised that these are some of the results on how much legal's grasping and leveraging AI?

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Kim Harlowe (23:38)

I'm very surprised because I've had the same experiences that you have. I've heard the same stories, know, while I was slow to adopt. And so maybe it's a reflection of what law departments are looking like today. Maybe it's a shift in terms of the makeup of those departments and the experiences of folks. And maybe we're starting to see that the influx of people that are more comfortable with technology and more quick to adopt and test and fail. I hope what it means is that we're

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we're creating an environment where we can fail. that's always been a struggle in the law department is we don't create that space. If you don't create a space to fail, it's really hard to find a tool that you can grow and develop. And so maybe there's a shift, Maybe there's a shift in being a little more willing to take chances on the failure. And so you're starting to see greater adoption rates.

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Mike Hamilton (24:24)

So I wanna focus a little bit on the discovery investigation life cycle. Where do you think AI generally fits in and where do you feel AI needs to keep its hands off of right now?

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Kim Harlowe (24:38)

don't know that there's any place AI needs to be hands off. it's less important to focus on AI and more important to focus on where do people fit into the process because people are going to have a role and a really, really important role in controlling and managing how AI fits. think you are starting to see a lot more instances in maybe it's char 3.0. I don't know.

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where AI is playing a greater role in some of the initial determinations on responsiveness calls or confidentiality or potential privilege calls. it's just an evolution of some of the technology solutions that have been available for a long time. It's just how you're executing on those technology solutions is a little bit different. one of the things that is a challenge for folks that are dipping their toe into AI is recognizing

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how much human involvement is really necessary, at least at the outset. I think there's an expectation because we hear about AI and how great it is, and it is, but it's not necessarily great out of the box. And I think there's a fair amount of work that needs to be done by people to get it trained and developed and to teach it to do the things you want it to do and the way you want to do it. And I think that's a surprise to most.

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And I think that can be off-putting to a lot of people where they think, AI can't do this. This isn't the right task for it. And I would argue it's not necessarily that it's not the right task. It's that you didn't project plan for the right amount of training and teaching and learning on the front end to make sure that you can truly utilize the tool the way you think. I think we're all trying to figure out how much time is required. I think we made a lot of assumptions on that that were wrong.

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Mike Hamilton (26:18)

One last question on this AI topic. Some in-house teams, we've had some guests say this, that our external customers in-house, that they expect to depend maybe a little less on outside counsel as their own AI capability grows in-house. Do you see that shift coming and does it change what you want from a firm?

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Kim Harlowe (26:39)

that's, that's actually a tough one. I'm not sure I've thought about it. so you're, you're going to get my off the cuff reaction. I'm not sure that it takes more work from, I don't know that I bring in more work. I think it's say, here's an example. maybe I could use co-counsel or one of those tools to do a comparison of a set of documents and identify differences. The tools can do that.

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But the results between me doing it today versus our outside counsel who are intimately aware of the legal issues around these documents, I'm going to frame the prompt very differently than somebody who is living and breathing this case day in and day out. And the quality of the results, I think, are going to mirror that level of expertise. AI is an important piece of doing that work in an efficient way. There is no doubt.

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And those are just two examples of tools that are out there to do those types of things. But I think in a lot of instances, not all, a lot of instances, my outside counsel are better positioned to be more precise and more targeted in how they get to those answers. And so in terms of how it affects what I'm looking for in an outside counsel firm, I want somebody who's looking at technology and is comfortable with technology and knows where technology can play a role.

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and how people and the expertise of people are critical in getting to that very precise specific answer that you're looking for. They have to be open to it.

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Mike Hamilton (28:10)

Would you consider AI powered automation as being the unlock for in house legal teams, more so than the case analysis side of things when you bring

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Kim Harlowe (28:23)

I think that's a really great distinction and you're absolutely right. If you can identify a repeatable process and create an agentic tool to go and execute those sort of process driven pieces of the work, that's absolutely going to drive efficiency and that probably is the at least first step in driving that work. you're spot on.

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Mike Hamilton (28:43)

Well, we're getting to the end of our time here, Kim. The conversation's been great. One of the questions I to ask you, and don't I don't mean to put you in a box, but someone's listening with an AI mandate, but no strategy. Monday morning, what's the one thing they should do?

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Kim Harlowe (28:59)

I'm not gonna give you one, because that would put me in a box a little bit too much, but I'm gonna give you a couple. The first is find your trusted outside counsel partner and have a conversation with them to get their input and insight and see how they can help you along the process. Because chances are they absolutely have groups that have tested and tried a number of these tools already and they can help you think about the work. So there's one trusted partner, go find them.

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Mike Hamilton (29:02)

Yeah.

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Kim Harlowe (29:26)

The second piece is to really look at what's the work being done internally? How long does it take? How much of an investment of time is it? How repeatable of a process is it? Going back to the point you just made a few minutes ago. Look at your outside counsel spend. What are the things that are costing a lot of money that are repeatable across firms that maybe you could identify solutions? Find the thing.

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Maybe you have a general counsel that's really risk averse, but you've been tasked with doing something AI related, then your SharePoint AutoField solution may be one that they could really get behind because it's finding information faster. It's figuring out where your leadership, how they feel about AI, what's their risk tolerance for using technology solutions. And if you do that analysis, something's going to jump out on a page.

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you just have to let the data drive you and really rely on a trusted external partner, whether it's an outside counsel or a vendor, really sort of lean on them to help you because they've done this a lot for a lot of clients. You shouldn't have to be learning this all on your own without the benefit of their knowledge and learnings already.

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Mike Hamilton (30:34)

Those are some really good tips. Kim, I like to end these conversations with what's the one thing if they listen if someone listens to this episode that you would want them to walk away with?

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Kim Harlowe (30:47)

So maybe again, I'm going to give you two because I'm greedy like that. One is maybe from the coaching side, which is celebrate the wins and learn from the losses. You need to be really purposeful in both to make sure that you're not missing something. You celebrate the learnings, you make people feel good. You just can't celebrate too long. You got to keep moving forward. But the losses are probably the most important piece.

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because you're going to learn how to do something way better. And if you didn't have that opportunity, your process wouldn't be able to grow as much as it should. The second piece is I would suggest that people take two and a half minutes and go and Google Brene Brown's marble jar analogy. I think it is two and a half minutes and I've shared it with folks on my team. It's similar story to the making deposits in a bank.

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But it's a story that's really relatable and it gives you an opportunity to start a conversation with your team about caring, about relationships, and about engaging. And I have found that I've learned a lot about some of the folks on my team that I've engaged in those conversations with.

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Mike Hamilton (31:55)

Well thank you so much, Kim Harlowe for joining us here on Data Exposure. It was a pleasure.

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Kim Harlowe (32:00)

Thank you so much. This has been fun.

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Mike Hamilton (32:03)

That was Kimberly Harlowe, Senior Director Litigation Support and Technology at Altria, on what legal leaders can learn from coaching, relationship building, and discipline AI strategy. The big takeaway: AI adoption is not just about choosing the right technology, it's about preparing the team, building trust across the organization, asking the right questions, and improving value in a way the business can understand. For legal, privacy, compliance, and security leaders.

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That means moving beyond knee-jerk reactions. Whether that reaction is to chase every new tool or reject innovation outright. The Smarter Path is measured, collaborative, and grounded in both business value and defensibility. You have been listening to Data Xposure brought to you by Exterro, the podcast for data risk leaders. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

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And join us next time as we continue exposing the decisions, risks, and strategies shaping the future of legal compliance security and data governance teams. Thanks for listening and I hope to see you next time.

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