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The AI-Enabled Legal Department: Report Launch

Earlier this year, research with more than 30 in-house legal leaders, The State of AI in In-House Legal 2026, found that 71% of legal teams were stuck in the pilot phase on AI. The barrier was rarely the technology. It was execution, the gap between experimenting with AI and embedding it as genuine capability.

The CLO Global AI Working Group was formed to close that gap. Chaired by Madeline Moncrieff, General Counsel at TikTok, a cohort of senior General Counsel spent the following months building a practical capability framework for legal teams adopting, embedding and governing AI, grounded in what is actually working inside their own functions rather than vendor theory.

On 15 June, at Legal Tech Talk in London, the group launches the resulting report. Three members of the editorial board who built it will present: David Lewis, Deputy Director of the AI Programme at the Government Legal Department; Olivier Hensby, Group Deputy General Counsel at Banking Circle Group; and Jelena Madir, Managing Director and Chief Compliance Officer at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Together they will set out where AI adoption in legal teams genuinely creates value, where it stalls, and what separates the teams that move from those that stay stuck.

Designed for senior General Counsel and legal leaders, the launch offers a peer-built blueprint for taking AI from pilot to embedded capability, and a framework attendees can take to their own boards.