In a sharp piece for the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Corporate Counsel Now, Tipalti chief legal officer Alice Davidson opens with a February ruling out of the Southern District of New York: a defendant’s chats with a public AI tool were not privileged, and handing them to counsel later did not fix that. Meanwhile employees paste contracts, customer data and source code into consumer tools nobody vetted. Someone has to own the speed and the exposure at the same time. Her answer: the general counsel.
Her fix is refreshingly practical. Her legal team adopted AI before the rest of the business (lawyers as first movers, imagine that). She runs AI governance with a stoplight list of approved tools, bars public AI for disputes and investigations unless counsel directs it, and treats case law as the early warning system because statutes will show up late and already outdated. Govern in real time, adjust tomorrow. It is also how a GC or CLO stops being the reviewer and becomes the architect. More on that shift in our guide to future-proofing in-house counsel.
As Davidson puts it: “The GC is no longer only the person who reviews what others build. The GC is the architect of how the company adopts AI, and the source of the guardrails that let it move fast without driving off the road.”
Read: The GC’s New Mandate: Architecting AI Governance in Real Time at ACC Corporate Counsel Now