From AI Pilots to Department-Wide Adoption: What In-House Legal Teams Need to Get Right

AI tools are becoming increasingly common in legal departments, but moving from individual experimentation to reliable, department-wide adoption remains a significant challenge. While many in-house legal teams are using AI for drafting, research, and routine tasks, fewer have successfully integrated it into their everyday workflows. The challenge isn’t necessarily the technology. It’s whether legal departments have the right foundations in place: organized and accessible institutional knowledge, connected systems, clear governance, and reliable processes for evaluating AI-generated work. How can in-house legal teams build these foundations without creating additional complexity, slowing down adoption, or introducing unnecessary risk? Join us Thursday, November 12, 2026, at 12:00 PM ET / 9:00 AM PT as Cat Carroll, Head of Legal Operations at iManage, Jessica Nguyen Chief Strategy & Legal Officer at Sandstone, and An Trotter, Principal at Pure Magic Productions, LLC, for a practical panel discussion featuring in-house legal leaders who will share their experiences implementing and scaling AI within their legal departments. Through real-world examples, lessons learned, and candid discussions of what worked—and what didn’t—the panel will explore how to move beyond isolated AI tools and pilots toward sustainable adoption that delivers measurable value. Attendees will learn how to: Move beyond isolated AI pilots: Identify the organizational, operational, and technical barriers preventing AI from becoming part of everyday legal workflows. Organize and connect legal knowledge: Make contracts, policies, playbooks, templates, and institutional knowledge accessible to AI tools without creating additional information silos. Establish practical AI governance: Define ownership, approval processes, access controls, and risk-based guardrails that support adoption without unnecessarily slowing down legal work. Build accuracy and quality controls: Integrate verification, human review, and escalation procedures into workflows to improve reliability and maintain trust in AI-generated outputs. Expand AI into higher-value legal work: Identify opportunities beyond drafting and research, including contract management, legal intake, compliance, and other core legal department processes. Measure success and scale effectively: Evaluate AI performance, adoption, efficiency gains, and business impact while developing a practical roadmap for broader implementation. Who Should Attend: This program is designed for general counsel, chief legal officers, in-house counsel, legal operations professionals, and legal department leaders who are implementing or expanding AI within their organizations. It will be particularly valuable for those responsible for AI strategy, legal technology, knowledge management, workflow optimization, and legal department operations. There is NO COST to attend this program! This program is FREE, thanks to our gracious sponsor, iManage! Can’t make it to the live program? The recording will be available in our Free Video Library.