The pressure is real. Boards want to know what legal is doing with AI. Budget conversations increasingly come with an implied condition: show us how you’re leveraging it, or lose funding. If you haven’t deployed AI yet, the assumption is that you’re already behind.
But responding to pressure instead of a plan is exactly how expensive mistakes get made.
En un artículo publicado en El asesor jurídico general de hoy, iDS President Cazador McMahon and Colin S. McCarthy, Founder and CEO of CMC Legal Strategies, argue that before any AI deployment, general counsel need to slow down long enough to ask the right questions. Getting to the wrong answer faster, they write, doesn’t help anyone. Automating a broken process just makes it break at scale.
The Five Questions
1. Do you understand the real problem?
Surface-level symptoms rarely tell the whole story. A legal department might diagnose rising outside counsel costs as a rates problem — when the real issue is a lack of early case assessment or a culture where disputes escalate without any internal triage process. AI can help solve each of those, but only once the correct problem has been identified. Otherwise, you risk efficiently managing the wrong issue.
2. Are the right people at the table — and being heard?
Technology decisions in legal departments often happen in a small room. But the people closest to the work — paralegals, litigation support teams, contract managers — often understand friction points that leadership never sees. Being in the room and being heard are two very different things. Collaborative decision making isn’t about slowing progress; it’s about avoiding expensive mistakes.
3. Can you envision what a real solution looks like?
Too many AI deployments begin with the technology and work backward toward a problem. Start instead with the outcome you actually want. McMahon and McCarthy draw a compelling parallel to Waymo’s autonomous driving model — where every mile driven feeds learning back into a central intelligence layer. The same shift is beginning in legal departments, where AI can connect data across contracts, disputes, compliance systems, and historical litigation records, transforming isolated matters into a continuous intelligence network for the business.
4. Have you defined what success looks like?
If you can’t define success before deploying AI, you won’t recognise it afterward — and you certainly won’t be able to defend the investment. The authors encourage GCs to look beyond cost savings and measure time-to-resolution, early case assessment accuracy, reduction in outside counsel revisions, and early detection of legal and compliance risks.
5. Where are the risks?
Every GC is trained to spot risk — apply that instinct here. What happens when the AI gets it wrong? Who reviews the output before it influences a decision? How does the tool handle privileged information? These aren’t reasons to avoid AI. They are the questions that separate a thoughtful deployment from a costly one.
The Bonus Question
McMahon and McCarthy close with the question many GCs consider privately but rarely discuss openly: how will AI impact my role? Their answer is clear — AI elevates the GC rather than diminishing them. Algorithms can surface patterns and model scenarios, but they cannot decide how much risk an organisation should take. That remains a leadership decision. The future isn’t about choosing between human judgment and artificial intelligence. It’s about designing systems where both work together.
At iDS, helping legal teams navigate exactly that balance is central to what we do. Our Gobernanza de la información, descubrimiento electrónico y divulgación, y Datos estructurados y análisis practices are built to help organisations deploy data-driven tools purposefully — with the human expertise to make them count.
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