LEGAL GEEK COMMUNITY NEWS - MAY 2025
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At Legal Geek North America 2025, we’re excited to welcome Elizabeth (Liz) Brown, General Counsel and Chief Administrative Officer at CSC Generation Enterprise, Inc. – a company transforming traditional retail brands like Backcountry, One Kings Lane, and Sur La Table into digital-first powerhouses.
Liz brings deep expertise from across the legal spectrum, with a career spanning private practice at Kirkland & Ellis, in-house roles at Groupon and Dover Corp., and federal clerkships at both the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio.
We caught up with Liz ahead of her session at Legal Geek North America 2025 to discuss legal tech adoption, the role of AI, and practical advice for in-house and law firm teams alike.
"Let your pain points guide you - wherever you're spending the most time on manual, repetitive tasks is likely the best place to start."
What is one piece of advice for legal teams looking to start adopting AI but not knowing where to begin?
It really comes down to identifying your pain points – those tasks that take up a lot of your team’s time but could be repeatable and automated. Focusing on these areas will naturally lead you to the vendors and AI tools designed to address them.
For an in-house legal team, that might mean using a tool to scan and summarise key points in contracts, or developing a bot to answer frequently asked employee questions about policies and processes. Let your pain points guide you – wherever you’re spending the most time on manual, repetitive tasks is likely the best place to start.
What’s the best piece of advice you have for evaluating legal tech tools and choosing the right one for your firm?
The answer to this question really depends on what your biggest pain points are – and identifying those in the first place.
For example, if we’re talking about a law firm, billing may be a key pain point. In that case, you might look to automate the process or explore how AI can support your billing initiatives. I’d recommend identifying AI companies that specialize in this area, setting up demos, and involving staff – or anyone who would benefit directly – so they can test the tool firsthand.
Another important point is that I always ask for references and request to speak with companies that have already adopted the tool. That way, I can get a firsthand impression of whether it’s truly delivering on what the vendor promises.
"I always ask for references and request to speak with companies that have already adopted the tool."
AI Adoption Index launched to benchmark true AI adoption across the global legal industry
The AI Adoption Index is an independent research initiative led by legal industry leaders, Tara Waters (TLW Consulting) and Jana Blount (Jana Blount Consulting). The aim of the Index is to bring greater transparency to the current state of AI adoption in the legal industry, remove hype, hyperbole and FOMO from the conversation, and enable organisations and individuals to focus on how to best drive and create value for themselves. By collecting and analysing anonymised data across roles and organisations globally, the Index seeks to provide the legal industry with a shared evidence base and benchmark to guide strategic AI adoption. Get involved.
Legal Industry’s first Behavioural Science AI-based Knowledge Amplification tool — Kingsley Napley & Let’s Think collaborate
Kingsley Napley has joined forces with legal tech startup Let’s Think to pilot The Knowledge Exchange — the first Behavioural Science AI-based knowledge amplification tool in the legal sector. This pioneering initiative uses AI grounded in the science of expertise and learning to unlock the know-how of senior lawyers and make it accessible across the firm. With a conversational interface and centralised database, the tool aims to preserve institutional knowledge, accelerate junior development, and enable smarter collaboration in hybrid teams. Currently in pilot with six senior litigators, a wider rollout is expected later this year. A bold step toward the “continuous legal brain” — and one to watch! Learn more.
Legal Geek insights: Secret agents
As GenAI’s reasoning and decision-making capability improves, and it is used for managing legal processes and workflows as well as routine tasks and admin, how long will it be before agentic AI starts making decisions that matter, and we enter a new era of AI legal services? How is the way we interact with GenAI platforms and apps changing? Is terminology consolidation moving GenAI away from anthropomorphism and towards ubiquity? Read Joanna’s article.
That’s a wrap for this edition! Check back next month for more community highlights, and ways to get involved.
Got news to share? We’d love to hear from you!
