Entertainment giant Disney is having a legal AI moment. Last week, Deadline reported that the company’s 1,000-strong Legal and Global Affairs group would face significant changes, with ‘automating workflows’ as part of the plan. At the same time, they’re looking for a Director of AI Enablement & Legal Engineering to ‘redesign’ those very same legal workflows – with a salary up to $260,000 if based in New York.

Disney has also hired its first company-wide CTO, Karandeep Anand, who was previously CEO at Character.AI, a genAI platform for avatar generation. In short, there is a lot happening in relation to AI at Disney – a company with a very significant legal division.

First the reported shakeup. AL has not independently confirmed the Deadline story, but it has been followed by other established sites such as the Hollywood Reporter and remains online. The Deadline story contains a memo reputedly from Horacio Gutierrez, Chief Legal and Global Affairs (LGA) Officer at Disney.

The memo contains several key aspects. It states:

‘LGA will be a much smaller organization than it is today, and some of you will personally be affected by decisions we make in this process.

‘As a result, we’ll have to consider a whole range of new models for different workloads, including automating certain workflows by leveraging the latest technologies, moving to self-service models where appropriate, engaging alternative legal providers and others, and new expanded share services, even outsourcing.’…

Because you read this