2026 Corporate Legal Operations Consortium Global Institute Mixtape

This is Ari Kaplan at the Corporate 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 Fulcrum Global Technologies. Ashley Newman, VP of marketing and AI enablement at FactorLaw. I'm Dan DeMaria. I'm co-founder and CRO of Skullbook.

Danielle Hoglund, senior director of global alliances, Agiloft. Don Swanson, founder, eDig365. Ed Chang, senior account executive, LexisNexis CounselLink. Evan Schenkman, chief knowledge and innovation officer, Fisher Phillips.

This is Jeff Cox. 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, and I'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.

I'm Scott Quinn, senior vice president of consulting services here at Sirion. Steve Schley, chief revenue officer at UnitedLex. What do you think of your first CGI? Tell us about your journey getting to this point in helping law departments manage their supply chain What questions are you receiving at your booth this year?

What contract challenges are people asking you about at this year's CGI? What is the benefit of attending the CLOC CGI for someone focused on alliances? What's the experience been like in the Startup Alley? What do you think is driving the energy that's made it so successful?

Why should law firm leaders come to the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium Global Institute? Has anything surprised you at this year's CLOC CGI? How would you characterize the emphasis on AI at this year's CLOC CGI? How do you see AI affecting data management?

What types of questions are you receiving? What is the interest in e-discovery at the CLOC CGI? What challenges are you hearing attendees at CLOC this year share with you? Tell me about your session at the CLOC CGI.

Did you accomplish what you needed to at this year's CLOC CGI? It's been an amazing experience. I'm really happy to see the people I've met after many years, but also so many new companies, so many amazing things people are doing. I'm here with Checkbox, we are the legal front door and it's important for us to show people why the legal front door is truly an operational update for how they practice law.

Whether you're in-house or you're practicing in a firm, how you get legal to your desk or to your legal team is a crucial structural component we've always had this vision from day one. We focus on enterprise strength, enterprise solutions. So when we started with law firms, one of the biggest efforts we wanted to focus on was getting into enterprise grade back office systems that could work on a single platform, that can run end to end, but always with the intent of connecting that supply chain all the way through to their clients, just like every other sector does except for legal.

The advent of AI has actually helped us a lot because we've been able to accelerate a lot of things with agentic layers and making things more efficient. So the connection between law firm clients to law firms from the time they spin up a matter to how that transits itself all the way through commercial into the law firm enterprise itself has been great. So that entire legal spend fabric and the supply chain for it, that's what's surfaced now. Very specific around training, and as our training focused on specific tool or more tool agnostic and how we can help clients consider training in their teams where they have a lot of different levels of maturity.

Some are vibe coding and some are barely using it to write an email. Very much focused on tool agnostic and a program that can speak to all levels, and bring the folks that are lagging to a space of understanding and excited about using AI. Continuing to move Those advanced folks along, but also using them to help those that are still learning, come up to their level. One of the biggest challenges we're seeing is around contract intelligence.

in-house lawyers, Are coming to us and saying, " when I need to either review a document or draft a document that I know I've done something similar in the past in some kind of way," and accessing that intelligence that exists latently in their, DMS, their CLM. But pulling it out and getting it in a just in time way is a challenge they think can hopefully be tackled by AI successfully, and that's certainly been a trend we've been seeing. A lot of people are coming up to saying, " 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, so it's a great opportunity to bring it full circle and connect with our partners and our joint customers. We did a session today with Integrys, and Epic implemented Agiloft at Integrys, so we did a joint session, and it was just So empowering to hear what Integrys was able to do with the combination of our technology and and Epik's consulting expertise.

Those moments are magic, and that's what this is all about, bringing people together so they can learn, connect, and go home empowered to do big things and excited to do big things. It's really exciting to be in the Startup Alley. There's a lot of amazing energy here and leaders and newcomers in legal technology , voices in AI, and people with innovations. We've brought a product to market that is innovative and different.

What's happened in the last few years is most corporations have moved to Microsoft 365, and if you need to collect information for investigations or litigation, you need to use the e-discovery tools. Our application surfaces reporting that is otherwise impossible to get without PowerShell, and this lack of observability into what has been done can lead to risks like having legal holds failed, but the organization not realizing it and getting sanctioned by the court. So our application, in a way, is like an insurance policy that helps ensure that corporations are compliant with their e-discovery activities.

It's been really just a great conference. In terms of traffic and engagements it'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 out to learn more, but also just the general temperature of the market, where they're looking at other solutions too, any solutions that have AI, which really crosses the boundaries of enterprise legal management solutions, contracts, so many different solutions across the board.

A lot of law firm leaders and law firms miss the boat if they try to guess on their own what their clients want, and CLOC is a great opportunity for us to hear directly from our clients as to what they want. I'm hoping to hear that we're on the right track, but also hear areas where we can delve in more. A lot of the corporations are hoping that their law firms are innovative, and doing exciting things, and taking chances, and doing things appropriately, and we're doing all that.

But I'd love to hear if there's something out there that they're looking for that we're not yet doing or something that they're looking for two, three, four years from now that we can prepare for now. That's why we're here. The opening keynote from Zach Kass was really surprising. He asked , "If you could automate everything in your life, where would you stop?"

And I think that's a really great question for us to all wrestle with. As AI can do more and more of the tasks that we used to think were purely human or something only you could do manually, now that question of what you can automate becomes more real. You can automate almost anything in legal right now. And the real question is, what do we want to protect, and where should attorneys be involved?

Understandable, if I had to put it in one word. I think we've hit this tipping point from it being a useful in and out to, oh, this can actually do things. There's a huge amount more interest this year than last, and that's due to several things. Some of it's obviously the insane work that the marketing team have been doing in driving interest in us in 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 executive on earth who does not have AI in their KPIs or OKRs for '26. What we're finding is that with innovation coming so fast in the AI world, the way everyone's talking about it is fundamentally different than how we look at this issue. There's a disconnect between how corporations and their legal teams, but also the information technology teams that support them, consider the use and adoption of AI, versus how the vendors that are trying to provide AI benefits to those corporations are envisioning that ultimate end state.

That disconnect is that most corporations do not wanna be sending all of their data outside to vendors or any other type of provider in order to leverage their models outside their own framework, their own IT environment, or use it to train a vendor's models. What X1 has done, leveraging our index-in-place methodology, is that we are now bringing AI to the data, not moving data to the AI. There's a really interesting dynamic right now where the capabilities of the products Or the way that you could utilize them is quite a bit further ahead than the adoption of a lot of teams.

So teams are grappling with how do they change the org, how do they teach their organization and their team to use these things to their fullest extent, so they don't go and procure a Ferrari and then drive it like a Fiat 500, so a lot of the questions at the moment are what are the kinds of use cases? How do you go through that education, that rollout, that upskilling? And how do you change the way the rest of the business works to interact with a new type of legal team? The interest for e-discovery at Legal Ops Conference 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 should be positioned with e-discovery, litigation management, whether to send everything to outside counsel, do more in-house.

Attendees are talking about how their non-legal business partners are just doing so much, and they have so many tools and resources at their disposal. And from their perspective, how are they able to keep up? How are they able to continue to be business friendly, business forward and, continue to give them the service that they expect as they're continuing to grow on their side? It was awesome, really.

I had a, C-Suite Unplugged session we just wrapped up, talking all about the impact of the ongoing agentic revolution that is here, not coming, but here for all of us in the legal operations function or even us as technology providers itself, and how are we managing the risk and the human change that we all have to go 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 this year, especially getting a sense for where people are at on their AI journey.

What surprised me was the diversity of where people are at on that AI journey, from people that are still exploring what to do and how to do it and why, all the way through to people 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. 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.

Thank you, Ari.