I spoke with Lexi Lutz, the General Counsel at Summize, a provider of AI-powered contract lifecycle management software. We discussed how law department leaders are balancing speed, governance, and trust in an AI-enabled era of legal services, where legal teams still struggle to gain credibility as innovation partners, and the skills that future lawyers and legal leaders need to succeed.
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(00:01):
Welcome to Reinventing Professionals,a podcast hosted by industry analyst
Ari Kaplan, which shares ideas,guidance, and perspectives from market
leaders shaping the next generationof legal and professional services.
This is Ari Kaplan, and I'm speakingtoday with Lexi Lutz, the general counsel
(00:24):
at Summize, a provider of AI-poweredcontract lifecycle management software.
Hi, Lexi.
How are you?
Hi, Ari.
I'm doing fantastic.
Thank you so much for having me on today.
It's a privilege.
I'm looking forward to this conversation.
Tell us about your backgroundand your new role at Summize.
(00:46):
I have spent the better part of the pastdecade in-house at different companies.
My first in-house gig was at CompassGroup, where I did employment law, and
then transitioned over to be a bit moreof a generalist at Extended Stay America.
From there, my most recent companywas Nordstrom, and there I was
heavily focused on privacy, AI, andcybersecurity from a legal standpoint.
(01:12):
Outside of those very corporate jobs I'vealways been pretty involved in the legal
profession organizations like the ABAACC, and local bar organizations trying
to help shape the legal profession,especially the in-house practice.
How would you characterize the connectionfrom leading privacy and governance at
(01:36):
Nordstrom to managing the entire legalportfolio at a legal technology company?
At Nordstrom, I was deeply embeddedinto the privacy, data, AI space,
and what that experience reallytaught me was the importance of
technology within any enterprise.
The common denominator between that roleand the role that I'm in now is trust.
(02:02):
Obviously the scope has changednow that I am with Summize.
I am managing not just a very specificarea of the law, but a full legal
portfolio of a fast-growing company.
But the fundamental orientationis generally the same.
It's understanding the business verydeeply and thoughtfully protecting it,
(02:23):
and also showing up as a business partnerrather than something to check the box.
I come into this role already havingbeen on the other side of the Summize
customers, so I've seen vendors give demosand make promises to completely transform
the legal department or the business.
(02:45):
I can already tell they are not afraidto be honest about the specific problems
that the tool can solve and what itcan't solve, and making a commitment
to working with legal departmentsand their business partners to fix-
the problems and issues that they'refacing in their day-to-day legal work.
(03:05):
How are law department leaders balancingspeed, governance, and trust in this
new AI-enabled era of legal services?
Law department leaders are really havingto balance it all especially with AI.
I feel like a common misconceptionthat I've been hearing is that
(03:26):
speed and governance have to beconstantly at odds with one another.
But if you're doing it correctly,it actually it can be the opposite.
if legal is perfectly positioned inthe company to be brought in at the
right time ideally earlier versusbe more reactive, then governance
doesn't necessarily have to be a brake.
(03:48):
It can be more of an accelerator that canspeed up the businesses and the processes
within the business to essentially actmore within the infrastructure of the
business versus a kind of afterthought.
And that is something also that Ireally did take for me from Nordstrom.
They did a really great job atbringing legal in as part of the
(04:10):
core team, especially if there wasa lot of data that was involved.
When your team knows what exactly needsto be approved by legal and who needs to
be held accountable, decisions can thenhappen faster, and legal can be less
of a bottleneck and more of a businesspartner that the business teams are
(04:30):
excited to bring in because, if we canget a framework and a process through
legal approved, then legal will set therunway, and then we can run with it, of
course, with an asterisk there somewherethat if there are any one-offs or huge
risks that are apparent obviously you'dwanna bring legal in, but just for
kind of general framework of business.
(04:50):
Where do legal teams struggle to gaincredibility as innovation partners?
Unfortunately as a profession, a lotof this issue of us not being seen
as innovative is self-inflicted.
Legal historically has spent the pasthowever many decades conditioning
businesses to expect that we willmove slowly and that we need to ask
(05:16):
75,000 questions, and then at the endof that, the business then gets a no.
Even as the profession has evolved,that reputation unfortunately
has stuck around a little bit.
So when I see legal teams struggle themost is when they try to just make a
case for innovation's sake, to say, "Oh,we're looking at our tech stack. We just
need to update it. We need to invest inAI." But of course, those conversations
(05:42):
go nowhere because the legal team isnot speaking in terms of the business.
The best way for legal teamsto innovate are to speak in
the language of the business.
If you are speaking with your CFO,they don't care about the tech stack.
They care about outside counselspend, or the COO how long is
it taking a contract to get frompre-signature to final execution.
(06:06):
And then what does your CRO care about?
They care about, how many dealsare sitting in the pipeline
in legal waiting to close.
So when you frame those conversationsas more of business outcomes that
actually matter to the people that areholding the budget, that's where legal
can be seen as more of an innovationpartner to all areas of the business.
(06:28):
That credibility as an innovation partnerrequires legal to be willing to be
vulnerable and say, " this is actuallysomething that we've been doing manually,
and it's been taking a lot of my time, andI think we can potentially automate this.
And that way I can be more involvedin some of the more complex strategic
thinking, where the business partners,actually want legal to be involved."
(06:52):
Where are organizations typicallyseeing the greatest benefit from
legal technology investments today?
Legal teams are seeing the greatestbenefit not necessarily from the flashy
AI use cases that have the most features.
It's more on back to the basics, sooperationally things that are simple
(07:14):
that have been a headache for your legalteam for years that can be updated and
automated and then done really well.
For example, a contract turnaroundtime or visibility into renewal or
self-service for the business forquestions that typically would have
to go through legal or get approvedthrough legal when maybe legal doesn't
(07:38):
necessarily have to see those terms.
These may seem like they are incrediblysimple, but they're actually wins
that I believe a business anda legal team really does feel.
And when the business feels it, the salesleader can then say, "Legal used to be
where everything slowed down, and wewould, turn it over to legal and just wait
(07:59):
on our hands." Instead, they're saying,"Wow, the legal team is really innovative.
They're helping us closethese deals faster.
We know when it goes to legal exactlyhow long the turnaround time is gonna
be." That is where the benefit tothe legal departments will come to
technology because legal will be seenas definitely much more of a strategic
business partner, and lawyers can bedoing the work that they signed up to do.
(08:23):
Instead of manually inputting things intoa spreadsheet or searching for contracts
from 2022 in their inboxes they'reactually able to help with handling data,
asking questions helping with diligenceof any new tools that they're using.
That's where I think the greatestbenefit will come to legal.
What are businesses expecting fromlegal teams today that they were not
(08:45):
considering five, even two years ago?
Five and even two years ago, legalwas seen as strictly risk managers.
Nowadays the bar has moved significantlybecause of AI and evolution of AI, and
a lot of the democratization of legalknowledge that we now have access to
(09:05):
and business teams have access to.
So the three main things thatare now very much expected of
legal are, number one, speed.
The pace of the business hasaccelerated in ways that legal
probably didn't expect two years ago.
So the old model of send it to legaland we'll get back to you in two
weeks might be gone at this pointbecause businesses want answers now
(09:25):
because everything is moving faster.
Visibility.
Five years ago, legal was a little bitof a black box where you'd ask legal
a question, they'd research it, they'dmaybe soundboard it with a colleague.
Now because people can ask, a largelanguage model and get a basic, generic
answer, albeit maybe not customizedto the business, but something that
(09:46):
could not be produced a few years ago.
Legal teams need to have visibility intowhat they can produce, and if not, they
lose credibility into whether the businesspartners actually trust their input.
The third is proactivity.
Businesses no longer wantlegal teams that are reactive.
They want legal to be readingthe landscape ahead of time,
seeing a mile down the road andaround the corner, especially on
(10:11):
things like AI and data privacy.
These evolving areas, thebusiness wants legal to be
ahead of it and not catching up.
AI can help on both sides of the coinwithin legal and within the business
side to address all of those things.
What skills will future lawyersand legal leaders need to succeed?
(10:34):
We all know what AI is good at.
AI is really good at taking large amountsof information and synthesizing it.
It is really good at legal researchor pattern recognition and those
are things that typically juniorlawyers would have spent hours
and hours doing for many years.
(10:55):
The next generation really has todo with differentiating themselves
through anything that's not that.
So communication, persuasion emotionalintelligence, the ability to read the
room, the ability to understand, yes,what the law is, but also the context
and any nuances that have to go alongwith that, and to distill that into a
(11:18):
language that the business understands.
A general purpose AI tool might be reallygood at very confidently telling you the
law, but if they don't have the yearsand years of institutional knowledge
and context that the lawyer has, andthe ability to then translate it into
terms that the business understandsthen it, then frankly, it means nothing.
(11:38):
Those are gonna be what matters inthis next era of legal practice.
How do you see the role of the moderngeneral counsel evolving as AI becomes
more embedded in daily operations?
The chief legal will also become the chiefbusiness strategist because legal will
(12:03):
be potentially brought in earlier becauseit's someone who's not necessarily just
advising on risk, but they're activelydesigning how the company operates.
So someone who sits at lawand technology and commercial
strategy has the credibility tospeak in all of those languages.
I don't think GCs necessarily have tobecome engineers or technologists, but
(12:28):
I do think that they need to have someform of literacy and potentially fluency
in the technology space, and particularlyaround AI because it's not going away not
within the business and not within legal.
So the GCs that are going to flourish andthrive are the ones who are embracing it
(12:49):
early versus the ones who are trying toresist because, the baseline is no longer
knowing just the business and the laws.
It's knowing what to do with thatinformation in the specific context
of your business and your industryin this specific moment in time.
(13:09):
Having lived this transition in realtime, both as a practitioner within an
in-house role, a more generalized industryversus now at Summize I think the legal
profession, we have always adapted.
We adapted to the internet, we adapted toglobalization, to the financial crisis.
So we will adapt to this, too.
(13:30):
The real question is whether you'readapting proactively or reactively,
and the GCs doing it proactively arethe ones that are having the most fun.
This is Ari Kaplan speaking withLexi Lutz, the general counsel at
Summize, a provider of AI-poweredcontract lifecycle management software.
Lexi, congratulations on your new role.
(13:51):
Wishing you the very best of luck.
Thank you, Ari.
It was great chatting with you today.
Thank you for listening to theReinventing Professionals podcast.
Visit reinventingprofessionals.com orarikaplanadvisors.com to learn more.
Welcome to Reinventing Professionals,a podcast hosted by industry analyst
Ari Kaplan, which shares ideas,guidance, and perspectives from market
leaders shaping the next generationof legal and professional services.
This is Ari Kaplan, and I'm speakingtoday with Lexi Lutz, the general counsel
(00:24):
at Summize, a provider of AI-poweredcontract lifecycle management software.
Hi, Lexi.
How are you?
Hi, Ari.
I'm doing fantastic.
Thank you so much for having me on today.
It's a privilege.
I'm looking forward to this conversation.
Tell us about your backgroundand your new role at Summize.
(00:46):
I have spent the better part of the pastdecade in-house at different companies.
My first in-house gig was at CompassGroup, where I did employment law, and
then transitioned over to be a bit moreof a generalist at Extended Stay America.
From there, my most recent companywas Nordstrom, and there I was
heavily focused on privacy, AI, andcybersecurity from a legal standpoint.
(01:12):
Outside of those very corporate jobs I'vealways been pretty involved in the legal
profession organizations like the ABAACC, and local bar organizations trying
to help shape the legal profession,especially the in-house practice.
How would you characterize the connectionfrom leading privacy and governance at
(01:36):
Nordstrom to managing the entire legalportfolio at a legal technology company?
At Nordstrom, I was deeply embeddedinto the privacy, data, AI space,
and what that experience reallytaught me was the importance of
technology within any enterprise.
The common denominator between that roleand the role that I'm in now is trust.
(02:02):
Obviously the scope has changednow that I am with Summize.
I am managing not just a very specificarea of the law, but a full legal
portfolio of a fast-growing company.
But the fundamental orientationis generally the same.
It's understanding the business verydeeply and thoughtfully protecting it,
(02:23):
and also showing up as a business partnerrather than something to check the box.
I come into this role already havingbeen on the other side of the Summize
customers, so I've seen vendors give demosand make promises to completely transform
the legal department or the business.
(02:45):
I can already tell they are not afraidto be honest about the specific problems
that the tool can solve and what itcan't solve, and making a commitment
to working with legal departmentsand their business partners to fix-
the problems and issues that they'refacing in their day-to-day legal work.
(03:05):
How are law department leaders balancingspeed, governance, and trust in this
new AI-enabled era of legal services?
Law department leaders are really havingto balance it all especially with AI.
I feel like a common misconceptionthat I've been hearing is that
(03:26):
speed and governance have to beconstantly at odds with one another.
But if you're doing it correctly,it actually it can be the opposite.
if legal is perfectly positioned inthe company to be brought in at the
right time ideally earlier versusbe more reactive, then governance
doesn't necessarily have to be a brake.
(03:48):
It can be more of an accelerator that canspeed up the businesses and the processes
within the business to essentially actmore within the infrastructure of the
business versus a kind of afterthought.
And that is something also that Ireally did take for me from Nordstrom.
They did a really great job atbringing legal in as part of the
(04:10):
core team, especially if there wasa lot of data that was involved.
When your team knows what exactly needsto be approved by legal and who needs to
be held accountable, decisions can thenhappen faster, and legal can be less
of a bottleneck and more of a businesspartner that the business teams are
(04:30):
excited to bring in because, if we canget a framework and a process through
legal approved, then legal will set therunway, and then we can run with it, of
course, with an asterisk there somewherethat if there are any one-offs or huge
risks that are apparent obviously you'dwanna bring legal in, but just for
kind of general framework of business.
(04:50):
Where do legal teams struggle to gaincredibility as innovation partners?
Unfortunately as a profession, a lotof this issue of us not being seen
as innovative is self-inflicted.
Legal historically has spent the pasthowever many decades conditioning
businesses to expect that we willmove slowly and that we need to ask
(05:16):
75,000 questions, and then at the endof that, the business then gets a no.
Even as the profession has evolved,that reputation unfortunately
has stuck around a little bit.
So when I see legal teams struggle themost is when they try to just make a
case for innovation's sake, to say, "Oh,we're looking at our tech stack. We just
need to update it. We need to invest inAI." But of course, those conversations
(05:42):
go nowhere because the legal team isnot speaking in terms of the business.
The best way for legal teamsto innovate are to speak in
the language of the business.
If you are speaking with your CFO,they don't care about the tech stack.
They care about outside counselspend, or the COO how long is
it taking a contract to get frompre-signature to final execution.
(06:06):
And then what does your CRO care about?
They care about, how many dealsare sitting in the pipeline
in legal waiting to close.
So when you frame those conversationsas more of business outcomes that
actually matter to the people that areholding the budget, that's where legal
can be seen as more of an innovationpartner to all areas of the business.
(06:28):
That credibility as an innovation partnerrequires legal to be willing to be
vulnerable and say, " this is actuallysomething that we've been doing manually,
and it's been taking a lot of my time, andI think we can potentially automate this.
And that way I can be more involvedin some of the more complex strategic
thinking, where the business partners,actually want legal to be involved."
(06:52):
Where are organizations typicallyseeing the greatest benefit from
legal technology investments today?
Legal teams are seeing the greatestbenefit not necessarily from the flashy
AI use cases that have the most features.
It's more on back to the basics, sooperationally things that are simple
(07:14):
that have been a headache for your legalteam for years that can be updated and
automated and then done really well.
For example, a contract turnaroundtime or visibility into renewal or
self-service for the business forquestions that typically would have
to go through legal or get approvedthrough legal when maybe legal doesn't
(07:38):
necessarily have to see those terms.
These may seem like they are incrediblysimple, but they're actually wins
that I believe a business anda legal team really does feel.
And when the business feels it, the salesleader can then say, "Legal used to be
where everything slowed down, and wewould, turn it over to legal and just wait
(07:59):
on our hands." Instead, they're saying,"Wow, the legal team is really innovative.
They're helping us closethese deals faster.
We know when it goes to legal exactlyhow long the turnaround time is gonna
be." That is where the benefit tothe legal departments will come to
technology because legal will be seenas definitely much more of a strategic
business partner, and lawyers can bedoing the work that they signed up to do.
(08:23):
Instead of manually inputting things intoa spreadsheet or searching for contracts
from 2022 in their inboxes they'reactually able to help with handling data,
asking questions helping with diligenceof any new tools that they're using.
That's where I think the greatestbenefit will come to legal.
What are businesses expecting fromlegal teams today that they were not
(08:45):
considering five, even two years ago?
Five and even two years ago, legalwas seen as strictly risk managers.
Nowadays the bar has moved significantlybecause of AI and evolution of AI, and
a lot of the democratization of legalknowledge that we now have access to
(09:05):
and business teams have access to.
So the three main things thatare now very much expected of
legal are, number one, speed.
The pace of the business hasaccelerated in ways that legal
probably didn't expect two years ago.
So the old model of send it to legaland we'll get back to you in two
weeks might be gone at this pointbecause businesses want answers now
(09:25):
because everything is moving faster.
Visibility.
Five years ago, legal was a little bitof a black box where you'd ask legal
a question, they'd research it, they'dmaybe soundboard it with a colleague.
Now because people can ask, a largelanguage model and get a basic, generic
answer, albeit maybe not customizedto the business, but something that
(09:46):
could not be produced a few years ago.
Legal teams need to have visibility intowhat they can produce, and if not, they
lose credibility into whether the businesspartners actually trust their input.
The third is proactivity.
Businesses no longer wantlegal teams that are reactive.
They want legal to be readingthe landscape ahead of time,
seeing a mile down the road andaround the corner, especially on
(10:11):
things like AI and data privacy.
These evolving areas, thebusiness wants legal to be
ahead of it and not catching up.
AI can help on both sides of the coinwithin legal and within the business
side to address all of those things.
What skills will future lawyersand legal leaders need to succeed?
(10:34):
We all know what AI is good at.
AI is really good at taking large amountsof information and synthesizing it.
It is really good at legal researchor pattern recognition and those
are things that typically juniorlawyers would have spent hours
and hours doing for many years.
(10:55):
The next generation really has todo with differentiating themselves
through anything that's not that.
So communication, persuasion emotionalintelligence, the ability to read the
room, the ability to understand, yes,what the law is, but also the context
and any nuances that have to go alongwith that, and to distill that into a
(11:18):
language that the business understands.
A general purpose AI tool might be reallygood at very confidently telling you the
law, but if they don't have the yearsand years of institutional knowledge
and context that the lawyer has, andthe ability to then translate it into
terms that the business understandsthen it, then frankly, it means nothing.
(11:38):
Those are gonna be what matters inthis next era of legal practice.
How do you see the role of the moderngeneral counsel evolving as AI becomes
more embedded in daily operations?
The chief legal will also become the chiefbusiness strategist because legal will
(12:03):
be potentially brought in earlier becauseit's someone who's not necessarily just
advising on risk, but they're activelydesigning how the company operates.
So someone who sits at lawand technology and commercial
strategy has the credibility tospeak in all of those languages.
I don't think GCs necessarily have tobecome engineers or technologists, but
(12:28):
I do think that they need to have someform of literacy and potentially fluency
in the technology space, and particularlyaround AI because it's not going away not
within the business and not within legal.
So the GCs that are going to flourish andthrive are the ones who are embracing it
(12:49):
early versus the ones who are trying toresist because, the baseline is no longer
knowing just the business and the laws.
It's knowing what to do with thatinformation in the specific context
of your business and your industryin this specific moment in time.
(13:09):
Having lived this transition in realtime, both as a practitioner within an
in-house role, a more generalized industryversus now at Summize I think the legal
profession, we have always adapted.
We adapted to the internet, we adapted toglobalization, to the financial crisis.
So we will adapt to this, too.
(13:30):
The real question is whether you'readapting proactively or reactively,
and the GCs doing it proactively arethe ones that are having the most fun.
This is Ari Kaplan speaking withLexi Lutz, the general counsel at
Summize, a provider of AI-poweredcontract lifecycle management software.
Lexi, congratulations on your new role.
(13:51):
Wishing you the very best of luck.
Thank you, Ari.
It was great chatting with you today.
Thank you for listening to theReinventing Professionals podcast.
Visit reinventingprofessionals.com orarikaplanadvisors.com to learn more.
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