2026 Corporate Legal Operations Consortium Global Institute Mixtape

It was a privilege to interview these leaders for this Reinventing Professionals mixtape at the 2026 Corporate Legal Operations Consortium Global Institute:  

• Saad Ahmed, Strategic Account Executive, Everlaw
• Ed Chang, Senior Account Executive, LexisNexis CounselLink
• Jeff Cox, Director of Brand, Steno
• Dan Di Maria, Co-Founder and CRO of Spellbook
• Larry Gill, CEO, X1 Discovery
• Danielle Haugland, Senior Director of Global Alliances, Agiloft
• Sam Karlin, Head of Legal, Blee
• Somya Kaushik, Chief Legal Officer, Checkbox
• Ross McNairn, CEO, Wordsmith
• Ashley Neuman, VP of Marketing and AI Enablement, Factor
• Scott Quinn, Senior Vice President of Consulting Services, Sirion
• Steve Schley, Chief Revenue Officer, UnitedLex
• Ahmed Shaaban, CEO, Fulcrum Global Technologies
• Evan Shenkman, Chief Knowledge and Innovation Officer, Fisher Phillips
• Don Swanson, Founder, eDig365
• Jonathan Williams, Legal Engineer, Legora   Music credit: Upbeat Corporate by AudioCoffee

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
This is Ari Kaplan at theCorporate Legal Operations
Consortium Global Institute 2026.
I'm Soumya Kaushik.
I'm chief legal officer at Checkbox.
My name is Ahmed Shaban.
I'm the CEO of FulcrumGlobal Technologies.
Ashley Newman, VP of marketingand AI enablement at FactorLaw.

(00:21):
I'm Dan DeMaria.
I'm co-founder and CRO of Skullbook.
Danielle Hoglund, senior directorof global alliances, Agiloft.
Don Swanson, founder, eDig365.
Ed Chang, senior accountexecutive, LexisNexis CounselLink.
Evan Schenkman, chief knowledge andinnovation officer, Fisher Phillips.
This is Jeff Cox.

(00:41):
I'm the director of brand at Syno.
Jonathan Williams, legal engineer, Legora.
I'm Larry Gill.
I'm the CEO of X1 Discovery.
I'm Ross McMahon, andI'm the CEO at Wordsmith.
My name is Saad Ahmed with Everlaw,and I'm a strategic account
executive covering the East Coast.
Sam Carlin, head of legal, BLI.

(01:03):
I'm Scott Quinn, senior vice presidentof consulting services here at Sirion.
Steve Schley, chief revenueofficer at UnitedLex.
What do you think of your first CGI?
Tell us about your journey gettingto this point in helping law
departments manage their supply chain
What questions are you receivingat your booth this year?
What contract challenges are peopleasking you about at this year's CGI?

(01:27):
What is the benefit of attending the CLOCCGI for someone focused on alliances?
What's the experience beenlike in the Startup Alley?
What do you think is driving theenergy that's made it so successful?
Why should law firm leaders cometo the Corporate Legal Operations
Consortium Global Institute?

(01:48):
Has anything surprised youat this year's CLOC CGI?
How would you characterize theemphasis on AI at this year's CLOC CGI?
How do you see AIaffecting data management?
What types of questions are you receiving?
What is the interest ine-discovery at the CLOC CGI?
What challenges are you hearing attendeesat CLOC this year share with you?

(02:11):
Tell me about yoursession at the CLOC CGI.
Did you accomplish what youneeded to at this year's CLOC CGI?
It's been an amazing experience.
I'm really happy to see the peopleI've met after many years, but
also so many new companies, so manyamazing things people are doing.
I'm here with Checkbox, we are thelegal front door and it's important

(02:33):
for us to show people why the legalfront door is truly an operational
update for how they practice law.
Whether you're in-house or you'repracticing in a firm, how you get
legal to your desk or to your legalteam is a crucial structural component

(02:54):
we've always had this vision from day one.
We focus on enterprisestrength, enterprise solutions.
So when we started with law firms, oneof the biggest efforts we wanted to
focus on was getting into enterprisegrade back office systems that could
work on a single platform, that can runend to end, but always with the intent
of connecting that supply chain all theway through to their clients, just like

(03:14):
every other sector does except for legal.
The advent of AI has actually helpedus a lot because we've been able to
accelerate a lot of things with agenticlayers and making things more efficient.
So the connection between law firm clientsto law firms from the time they spin up
a matter to how that transits itself allthe way through commercial into the law
firm enterprise itself has been great.

(03:35):
So that entire legal spendfabric and the supply chain for
it, that's what's surfaced now.
Very specific around training, andas our training focused on specific
tool or more tool agnostic and howwe can help clients consider training
in their teams where they have alot of different levels of maturity.
Some are vibe coding and some arebarely using it to write an email.

(03:56):
Very much focused on tool agnosticand a program that can speak to all
levels, and bring the folks that arelagging to a space of understanding
and excited about using AI.
Continuing to move Those advancedfolks along, but also using them
to help those that are stilllearning, come up to their level.
One of the biggest challenges we'reseeing is around contract intelligence.

(04:18):
in-house lawyers, Are coming to us andsaying, " when I need to either review
a document or draft a document thatI know I've done something similar
in the past in some kind of way," andaccessing that intelligence that exists
latently in their, DMS, their CLM.
But pulling it out and getting it ina just in time way is a challenge they
think can hopefully be tackled by AIsuccessfully, and that's certainly

(04:42):
been a trend we've been seeing.
A lot of people are coming up tosaying, " i'm implementing AI tools,
but I'm still starting from scratch.
Is there a way we could tackle,the intelligence that exists in the
work I've done in the past before?"
A lot of our partners are here, soit's a great opportunity to bring
it full circle and connect with ourpartners and our joint customers.
We did a session today with Integrys,and Epic implemented Agiloft at

(05:09):
Integrys, so we did a joint session,and it was just So empowering to hear
what Integrys was able to do withthe combination of our technology
and and Epik's consulting expertise.
Those moments are magic, and that'swhat this is all about, bringing people
together so they can learn, connect,and go home empowered to do big

(05:30):
things and excited to do big things.
It's really exciting tobe in the Startup Alley.
There's a lot of amazing energy here andleaders and newcomers in legal technology
, voices in AI, and people with innovations.
We've brought a product to marketthat is innovative and different.
What's happened in the last fewyears is most corporations have
moved to Microsoft 365, and if youneed to collect information for

(05:55):
investigations or litigation, youneed to use the e-discovery tools.
Our application surfaces reporting thatis otherwise impossible to get without
PowerShell, and this lack of observabilityinto what has been done can lead to
risks like having legal holds failed,but the organization not realizing it

(06:15):
and getting sanctioned by the court.
So our application, in a way, islike an insurance policy that helps
ensure that corporations are compliantwith their e-discovery activities.
It's been really just a great conference.
In terms of traffic and engagementsit's probably been the best one yet.
Attendance is up.
There's a lot of excitement about AI,and you're seeing a lot of people come

(06:39):
out to learn more, but also just thegeneral temperature of the market, where
they're looking at other solutions too,any solutions that have AI, which really
crosses the boundaries of enterprise legalmanagement solutions, contracts, so many
different solutions across the board.
A lot of law firm leaders and lawfirms miss the boat if they try
to guess on their own what theirclients want, and CLOC is a great

(07:01):
opportunity for us to hear directlyfrom our clients as to what they want.
I'm hoping to hear that we're onthe right track, but also hear
areas where we can delve in more.
A lot of the corporations are hopingthat their law firms are innovative,
and doing exciting things, andtaking chances, and doing things
appropriately, and we're doing all that.
But I'd love to hear if there's somethingout there that they're looking for that
we're not yet doing or something thatthey're looking for two, three, four years

(07:24):
from now that we can prepare for now.
That's why we're here.
The opening keynote from ZachKass was really surprising.
He asked , "If you could automateeverything in your life, where would you
stop?" And I think that's a really greatquestion for us to all wrestle with.
As AI can do more and more of thetasks that we used to think were purely
human or something only you could domanually, now that question of what

(07:45):
you can automate becomes more real.
You can automate almostanything in legal right now.
And the real question is, whatdo we want to protect, and where
should attorneys be involved?
Understandable, if I hadto put it in one word.
I think we've hit this tipping pointfrom it being a useful in and out
to, oh, this can actually do things.
There's a huge amount moreinterest this year than last,

(08:07):
and that's due to several things.
Some of it's obviously the insanework that the marketing team have
been doing in driving interest in usin particular and some of it's the
ecosystem, the environment, the culture.
People have a bigger awareness of it.
I'm not sure there's any executiveon earth who does not have AI
in their KPIs or OKRs for '26.
What we're finding is that withinnovation coming so fast in the AI

(08:29):
world, the way everyone's talkingabout it is fundamentally different
than how we look at this issue.
There's a disconnect between howcorporations and their legal teams,
but also the information technologyteams that support them, consider the
use and adoption of AI, versus howthe vendors that are trying to provide
AI benefits to those corporations areenvisioning that ultimate end state.

(08:54):
That disconnect is that most corporationsdo not wanna be sending all of their
data outside to vendors or any othertype of provider in order to leverage
their models outside their ownframework, their own IT environment,
or use it to train a vendor's models.

(09:16):
What X1 has done, leveraging ourindex-in-place methodology, is
that we are now bringing AI to thedata, not moving data to the AI.
There's a really interesting dynamicright now where the capabilities of
the products Or the way that you couldutilize them is quite a bit further ahead
than the adoption of a lot of teams.

(09:37):
So teams are grappling with how do theychange the org, how do they teach their
organization and their team to usethese things to their fullest extent,
so they don't go and procure a Ferrariand then drive it like a Fiat 500, so
a lot of the questions at the momentare what are the kinds of use cases?
How do you go through that education,that rollout, that upskilling?

(09:59):
And how do you change the way therest of the business works to interact
with a new type of legal team?
The interest for e-discovery at Legal OpsConference is primarily driven by leaders
who wanna know more, be well-informed,and go back to their litigation leaders
or IT leaders on how the company shouldbe positioned with e-discovery, litigation
management, whether to send everythingto outside counsel, do more in-house.

(10:22):
Attendees are talking about how theirnon-legal business partners are just
doing so much, and they have so manytools and resources at their disposal.
And from their perspective,how are they able to keep up?
How are they able to continue to bebusiness friendly, business forward
and, continue to give them theservice that they expect as they're
continuing to grow on their side?

(10:44):
It was awesome, really.
I had a, C-Suite Unplugged session we justwrapped up, talking all about the impact
of the ongoing agentic revolution thatis here, not coming, but here for all of
us in the legal operations function oreven us as technology providers itself,
and how are we managing the risk andthe human change that we all have to go

(11:08):
through to adopt these new solutions.
It's always a great place to see friends,old and new, get a sense for what the
legal operators are up to, and thisyear, especially getting a sense for
where people are at on their AI journey.
What surprised me was the diversityof where people are at on that AI
journey, from people that are stillexploring what to do and how to do

(11:30):
it and why, all the way through topeople really on the head of the curve.
Soumya, thank you.
Thank you.
Amit, thank you.
No, thank you very much.
Been fantastic.
Ashley, thank you.
Thank you.
Daniel, thank you.
Yeah, absolutely.
No problem.
Danielle, thank you.
Of course.
Thank you.
John, thank you.
No, thank you.
Ed, thank you.

(11:51):
Thank you.
Evan, thank you.
My pleasure.
Jeff, thank you.
You're welcome.
Jonathan, thank you.
Thank you so much, Ari.
Larry, thank you.
You're welcome, Ari.
Thank you.
Russ, thank you.
Thanks very much for having me.
Saad, thank you.
Yeah, no problem.
Sam, thank you.
Great.
Scott, thank you.
Thank you, Ari.
Steve, thank you.

(12:11):
Thank you, Ari.