If we put the increasingly hot topic of generative AI's potential to the side for a moment, one of my major takeaways from this year's Legalweek conference in New York was how my in-house peers who have embraced technology, are establishing themselves as key contributors at the executive level and growing their influence across the enterprise. It is clear from the discussions I had last week that legal technology is both altering and emphasizing the role of Legal in organizations, as in-house teams rise to the challenge of balancing increasingly complex workloads, growing regulatory and contractual compliance obligations, and slashed budgets.

Take contracts as an example. Commercial transactions and relationships are, by and large, governed by contracts and in-house teams are tasked with managing, negotiating, and optimizing thousands of contracts. Manually reviewing those contracts to identify risk and ensure regulatory compliance is a monumental task, but when Legal makes the move from identifying risk to managing risk, they enhance the agility of their business and drive real revenue and shareholder value. That's typically only possible if Legal has a complete record and management of their company's contracts. As a result, those in-house legal teams who have progressed past the efficiency phase of managing their contracts to leveraging the risk management and business acceleration insights available from those contracts can really guide strategic decision-making at the highest levels and demonstrate the value of having Legal more involved at the executive table.