Key Takeaway: Legal must shift from a cautious posture to a ‘machine speed’ mindset and become the ‘department of how’ by pairing AI adoption with the adaptability and creativity required to solve hard problems. 

The conversation at Running Legal Like a Business (RLLB) looked past questioning whether legal teams should adopt AI. Rather, it extended to the operating discipline and toward actionable strategies to put both into practice. Known for its substantive content, the sessions that resonated most were not about tools. They focused on mindset: measuring success by work eliminated rather than work performed, prioritizing the skills and roles that matter most, building resilience to sustain the pace of change, and viewing agentic AI as an operating shift rather than a productivity hack. 

How AI Enables Legal Operations To Move at Machine Speed 

The event’s opening keynote, “The GC Role in 2030: AI, Transformation, and Competitive Advantage,” set the tone with a blunt reframe: legal has to operate at “machine speed,” and measure success by the work eliminated rather than increased productivity. The data available in modern legal departments positions general counsel and other leaders as strategic enablers of the business. 

Business is moving faster than traditional legal review can keep pace with, and that gap is a competitive risk. In an AI world, legal teams must not only eliminate risk they need to focus on managing it intelligently. The mandate is clear: fewer redlines, sharper judgment, and technology to surface what truly matters.  

Contract lifecycle management (CLM) and AI compress review cycles, surface real risk, and push mitigation downstream where it belongs. Trust the data, trust the technology, and raise risk tolerance.  

AI doesn’t equal business transformation on its own. The transformation happens when the time AI frees up is reinvested in judgment, relationships, and the parts of the job that  require humans.  

Legal Operations Has Become the “Department of How” 

The keynote presented a goal legal ops teams have been chasing for years: legal as the "department of how (to get hard stuff done)," rather than the dreaded "department of no." As one general counsel put it, he’d rather hand out speeding tickets than parking tickets to his team. Adopting that mindset requires a tolerance for the right mistakes. Leaders need to balance the instinct to control risk against business priorities, giving lower-risk decisions room to move fast. 

A later session, “The AI-Era Legal Talent Model: How Legal Departments Are Redesigning Skills, Roles and Workforce Strategies,” reinforced this theme. The top five soft skills on the rise within corporate legal, per the panel’s research, are adaptability and learning agility, enthusiasm for new technology, human-AI collaboration, problem-framing and critical thinking, and creativity. All these skills reinforce the department of how. Presenters noted that leading organizations are prioritizing these same qualities: flexibility, adaptability, and a willingness to embrace change enterprise-wide. 

Look in the Mirror: Assess Legal Operations Readiness Before Modernizing 

Another RLLB keynote from Rich Bracken (author of Shiftward: How Small Shifts Create Sustainable Change), identified a key shift for anyone looking to build momentum, personally or professionally. The “look in the mirror” shift holds that “you can’t navigate from a point you won’t admit you’re at.” The same idea, recognizing where you actually stand, came up again in a session on IP management systems and the reality check on modernization. Whether the technology in question is IP management, CLM, or any other corporate legal system, readiness remains critical. Understanding the current state is essential for effective modernization. 

Before setting a transformation roadmap, organizations must understand their starting point. Organizations that assess their current state candidly and remain open to guidance build a clearer path toward their goals. Time spent upfront on that assessment and on stress-testing requirements and goals pays dividends throughout the engagement. 

Rapid change in legal technology continues to reshape priorities across the legal operations community, and next year’s RLLB themes are anyone’s guess. But if this year is any indication, the conversation won’t be about whether to change. It will be about how fast. 

Learn more about Epiq Contracts AI Advisory and Implementation.


Rebecca Yoder, Director, Legal Transformation Solutions
Rebecca works with legal departments to accelerate business through modernizing contracts operations with strategy and initiatives tailored to their strategic objectives and operating model. With nearly three decades of experience at the intersection of corporate legal operations and technology, she is adept at driving change inside complex global legal teams and helping stakeholders to understand, adopt, and champion new processes.