We started Evisort back in 2016 from the Harvard Innovation Labs as collaborative research between Harvard Law and MIT Data Science researchers. Now, we return annually to teach the next generation about how to use AI and also sponsor various innovative events on campus such as the Harvard Legal Technology Symposium (which I co-founded as a law student), and unique events focused on integrating students and legal leaders like this year’s Executive Innovation Summit (EIS) which capped off an incredible two weeks in Cambridge.

Let's dive deeper into the EIS, which was facilitated by Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession.

The event opened with a welcome dinner headlined by Professor David Wilkins, who took attendees through a history of the role of legal operations and how the remit of legal operations leaders has expanded as the profession became more mature - especially in a world punctuated by issues that are increasingly “VUCA” (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous).

The following morning, Professor Scott Westfahl kicked off the day by discussing the need for and value of adaptive leadership in the rapidly evolving legal profession of today. This conversation set the scene for the day by articulating how legal teams can set up their teams to adopt more innovation.

Opening the sessions, Jerry Ting, CEO and Founder of Evisort and Harvard Law lecturer, sat down with Jenn McCarron, President of CLOC, to discuss how AI is transforming legal departments. They talked about ‘Legal Ops 3.0’ and how the next stage of Legal Ops involves leaders being more strategic and elevating their impact to the C-Suite.

Next up, Mike Haven, Intel Legal Operations Leader (and who Jenn succeeded as President of CLOC) sat down with Amine Anoun, CTO and Co-Founder of Evisort, to discuss how to stay ahead of the curve of legal technology. They talked about groups like The SENSE Collective, which is a group of corporate legal leaders from Fortune 500 companies evaluating and building use cases for AI collaboratively.

Jake Sussman, COO and Co-Founder of Evisort, then led a session with Jeff Marple, Director of Digital Transformation at Harbor Labs, where they focused on maximizing the value of customizable AI. This session included a demo of Evisort’s new Document X-Ray™ tool, which enables users to train new AI models that flexibly track document information in any format (extraction, risk scores, summarization, etc.). They shared stories from the field discussing the diverse use cases that companies from a variety of industries were able to tackle by taking advantage of customizable AI tools.

Following that demo/demonstration, Rachael McBrearty, Evisort’s CCO, and Carol Hopperton, Legal Chief of Staff at Vonage, talked about how to best enable legal departments to use AI solutions. Strategies discussed included how to partner with alternative legal service providers and also using high-touch non-AI features like workflow to acclimate users to more advanced capabilities.

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Allison Silver, Global Head of COO Operations and Strategy at Zoom, then took the stage with Evisort’s Chief Strategy Officer, Riley Hawkins, to talk about taking legal operations beyond legal. Allison dove into her legal operations path and her current work, which is now uniquely based in the office of the COO instead of the CLO. She discussed using design thinking to make sure that the projects she touches have strategic impact throughout Zoom business units.

Lastly, Tom Orrison, Senior Director of Legal Operations for Microsoft, sat with me (in my role as EVP of Legal & Business Intelligence at Evisort), to talk about pushing the envelope of AI in legal departments. Few legal operations leaders in the world felt more pressure to incorporate AI in their day-to-day operations than Tom in the last year. He discussed how he runs experiments, evaluates results, and prioritizes projects in a world where demand for automated services from legal has skyrocketed.

After the close of sessions, Bryon Fong, Executive Director of Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession (CLP), facilitated hours of roundtable discussions in a program entitled ‘The State of AI in Legal Departments: Operationalizing Innovation for Strategic Gain’. Attendees used the opportunity to reflect on topics learned throughout the day and learn about the research CLP has conducted for years tracking the shift in technology adoption among corporate legal teams.

The Executive Innovation Summit was a tremendous success that was rich with insights and learnings from many of the brightest minds in the legal and legal tech professions. We can’t help but be excited at where their visions will take us as we head toward next year’s event.