Tom Saunders shares some behind-the scenes data on what senior in-house leaders are thinking about when it comes to the return on investment from AI and whether radical restructuring is required.

RSGI brought together 50 senior in-house legal leaders from across Europe on 24 September, under Chatham House rules, for a conversation that worked as something like a temperature check on where corporate legal departments genuinely stand on AI.

The first major theme the GCs landed on was pressure to prove AI’s value to finance. One delegate described a qualitative approach: rather than chasing speed for its own sake, they’ve deliberately resisted the temptation to compress a week’s work into an hour, aiming instead for a single day, protecting the time for a proper review. “The business wants an answer in a day,” as they put it, “not an hour and not a week.” The idea is that the business gets higher quality answers, not just faster ones. Others have opted for a more granular approach, tracking time-to-first-response, time spent with external counsel, and total time to matter resolution as standard metrics, using that data directly in conversations with their CFO.

Whatever their approach, almost everyone in the room had built some formal way to measure themselves, and several delegates specifically named the ambition to become more data-driven as a team.…

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