Build vs. Buy Your Legal AI Stack: A Practical Decision Framework for In-House Legal Teams

The legal AI market is flooded with vendors claiming to be your entire legal stack. Meanwhile, your business is pushing back with the obvious question: why buy a tool when we can just build it? The real question isn’t whether to build or buy. It’s whether you’ve asked the right legal questions first. Does this architecture fit how your team actually works? Who owns liability when something goes wrong? Will it hold up against the data security commitments you’ve already made to clients? Build vs. buy in legal carries stakes that go well beyond IT. Privilege, data residency, IP ownership, and long-term vendor dependency are all on the table — and they don’t show up in most build-vs-buy spreadsheets. Join us on Tuesday, July 14, 2026, at 3:00 PM ET / 12:00 PM PT as Lily Schurra, Senior Commercial Counsel at Sourcegraph, Lauren Schwartz, General Counsel at Centific, and Jessica Nguyen, Chief Legal Officer at Sandstone, walk through a vendor-agnostic decision framework for the legal AI stack — what to build, what to buy, where general-purpose AI hits its limits in legal work, and how to recognize when a DIY solution has outgrown your team’s capacity to maintain it. What You’ll Learn: Why the build-vs-buy decision is harder for legal than any other business unit, and where foundation models genuinely fall short for legal work A vendor-agnostic legal decision framework covering privilege and confidentiality, data residency and security, IP ownership, maintenance burden, and long-term vendor dependency What “building” realistically means in 2026 — what your team can actually maintain, and the operational signals that tell you a DIY solution has outgrown your capacity When to build, when to buy, and when to wait, with practical guidance by use case (contract review, legal research, intake, drafting) Concrete criteria to bring to your next internal conversation with IT, security, and finance about how to build your legal AI stack Who Should Attend: This program is designed for general counsel, deputy general counsel, legal operations leaders, contracts managers, and members of corporate legal teams responsible for AI strategy, vendor evaluation, or technology investment. It will be especially useful for legal and ops professionals navigating internal build-vs-buy conversations with IT, security, and finance — or trying to translate legal-specific risk into criteria the rest of the business can evaluate. There is NO COST to attend this program! This program is FREE, thanks to our gracious sponsor, Sandstone! If you can’t make it to the live program, the recording will be available for viewing via our paid CLE library, In-House Connect On-Demand.