The CLO’s POV: How AI & LDI Can Turn Data into Strategic Intelligence

In a global survey of 60 Chief Legal Officers (CLOs) at large corporations around the world, over three quarters of the respondents said that they expect in-house teams to leverage generative AI in legal workflows. The survey highlights how, as generative AI solutions gain traction across industries, legal teams are keen to dispel the outdated notion of being technology laggards and are now embracing AI in their work.

This shift was covered in a panel discussion titled Transforming Opportunity into Action: Legal Data Challenges and AI, featuring LDI founding member and serial tech entrepreneur Omar Haroun and Rob Beard, Chief Legal and Global Affairs Officer at Coherent Corp.

“I think AI has really been an inflection point. I’ve spoken to around 150 CLOs in the past year. And they’re all finding themselves in a position where they have to think about AI,” Haroun said during the discussion.

Beard, whose career spans over two decades with top legal roles at Mastercard and Micron Technology, observed that the emergence of generative AI solutions like ChatGPT and its popularization in the public consciousness has been a huge catalyst.

“A lot of general counsels and chief legal officers were not forward-thinking about AI a few years ago. I would talk about it with my peers, and it seemed like I was the only one paying attention to it. But today every CLO is thinking about it. I used to think I’m a bit of a pioneer, but I guess I’m just like everybody else now,” he joked.

Filling the Information Vacuum in a Data Deluge

A key theme of the panel discussion was the value of finding the right information at the right time to help GCs and CLOs offer strategic advice to business partners. At a time when organizations are drowning in data, the ability to extract relevant and actionable information hidden in a morass of data is crucial.

Beard shared an anecdote from earlier in his career when he was negotiating a supply agreement with a major customer. “We received a request on a limitation of liability. My Chief Business Officer asked me, ‘What’s the biggest limitation of liability request in context of the business value?’ He wanted to know how he could size what this customer was asking for.”

After consulting with his team, Beard realized that it would cost significant human effort—including going through each and every contract and re-tagging each one—to find the answer. “By then, of course, the deal would have been over. So we couldn’t get this amazing, actionable information to inform a business decision. I thought at the time that there had to be a better way to do it. That’s when I really started thinking about AI.”

The Role LDI Practitioners Play in Leveraging Generative AI

Beard cited a range of areas where using AI to surface hard-to-find information can be a game-changer. For example: analyzing rebates and incentives across a large body and variety of contracts at the close of the quarter to determine how much you owe and are owed; assessing the liability associated with vendor outages in large infrastructure deployments; and so on.

Ultimately, finding the right answer to these business questions comes down to finding the right information in the ocean of data that organizations are swimming in. “LDI has given us a vocabulary to talk about these data challenges and a process to address them. Fundamentally, at a macro-level, these are all questions that LDI practitioners can help you answer,” Haroun said.

To that end, according to Beard, a useful role LDI practitioners can play is extracting the right information that could help legal teams offer better strategic advice. “I’m always telling lawyers that if you want to be the best strategic advisor to the sales or procurement team, think about what information you are walking into their meetings with. That’s where LDI practitioners can help in getting that information out of our contracts and purchase orders—getting that data out of our systems to arm lawyers with information that’s actionable and strategic.”

In-Demand Skills in the Era of Agentic AI and Prompt Engineering

With the rise of autonomous AI agents capable of performing routine and repetitive tasks, the panel also explored how this increasing adoption of agentic AI will change the skills and competencies legal teams need.

“It’s very different from how legal teams operate today. Today, you get a project, you call your outside counsel, even though someone from your team may have asked the same question six months ago. But of course, you don’t know that, so you find your answer and you move on. In the future, I’ll be looking for people who are very comfortable querying a shared knowledge center and actioning that information to guide a strategic discussion,” Beard said.

Haroun added a note of caution: Despite the step-change leaps that AI models are making today, it is more important than ever for legal professionals to remain in the loop to ensure models are deployed with efficiency and with the defensibility that can pass muster with regulators and courts.

Editor’s Note: As a companion read to this blog post, check out a previous post in which we discuss how data-oriented legal professionals can view their skills through a wider aperture, and reposition themselves as LDI practitioners to take on a broader mandate.