I’m attending Relativity Fest this week in Chicago. Relativity Fest is put on by the e-discovery software provider Relativity. Relativity is one of the largest discovery software providers. Relativity Fest is its extravagant user conference. According to Relativity, there are a record 2000 attendees at this year’s show, the 15th annual one.
I attended a panel discussion early in the conference on the findings of an annual in-house counsel Survey conducted jointly by the consulting firm FTI and Relativity. On the panel were Ari Kaplan, the principal investigator for the Survey, Adam Weiss, Relativity’s Chief Legal Officer; Wendy King, Senior FTI Director; and Celia Perez, in-house counsel at FreightCar America.
This was the sixth such Survey. Kaplan talked to some 34 in-house counsel in 11 countries.
Deja Vu All Over Again
The panel opened with a discussion of the evolving role of in-house counsel. To sum up, in-house counsel believe they are facing more and more uncertainty. 85% of those surveyed believe the risks to their companies will be ever-increasing. They report they are also expected to be knowledgeable in all sorts of new and different areas as compliance and data privacy risks increase. In short, in-house counsel are expected to be experts on anything and everything. At the same time, in-house counsel continue to be challenged to do more with less.
The Survey responses and the panelists’ comments seemed to suggest the attitude toward these tools is still very much lukewarm
Given all this, one would think that in-house counsel would be leaping to use AI and GenAI to do such things as work that does not necessarily require legal expertise or to learn about new areas. Instead, the Survey responses and the panelists’ comments seemed to suggest the attitude toward these tools is still very much lukewarm. I frankly felt like, despite the quantum
