Episode
Legal Just Left the Basement: How AI Is Making the CLO the Most Powerful Person in the Room
- Published
- Mar 27, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1391
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Summary
The legal department has spent decades as a reactive cost center, called in to fix problems, not prevent them. That's over. In this conversation recorded live at the UDF Lighthouse Customer Forum in Scottsdale, David Cowen sits down with Russ Elmer , General Counsel of ServiceNow, to unpack why 2026 is the year legal transforms from bottleneck to force multiplier, and why the CLO's team is uniquely positioned to become the strategic hub of the entire enterprise. Key Topics Covered: Legal as the enterprise hub: Why the legal department, which touches HR, engineering, finance, and beyond, is better positioned than any other function to generate cross-functional intelligence at scale The bundling/unbundling inflection point: Law firms spent 40 years bundling every knowledge service imaginable. AI is now unbundling all of it, and what's left (judgment, context, relationships) is exactly where great lawyers live The AI dividend: When routine questions and contract redlines get automated, an entire workforce of critically-trained, liberal arts-educated thinkers gets unchained from their desks and unleashed on strategic problems The digital twin concept: Russ shares his vision for a "smarter Russ Elmer," an AI that doesn't just replicate his decisions, but improves on them in real time Brain + arms and legs: Why information alone is worthless without action, and how the ServiceNow partnership is designed to close that gap from insight to outcome The forward-deployed legal engineer: David's framework for the most important career move in legal right now: embed, bridge, build, and grind, because 2026 is the year you either double down or fall behind What legal looks like in 2030: How Russ's team is reimagining org structure, work distribution, and the very definition of what a…