Chris Adams of Consilio says legal departments have moved past curiosity. The harder work now is turning tools, data, workflows and talent into governed, measurable legal operations.
Legal departments have heard the AI pitch. Now they have to make it work.
That is the shift Chris Adams of Consilio sees across the market. General counsel and legal operations leaders are no longer asking whether AI will matter to legal. They are asking where to start, which work to move first, how to govern the risk, how to use the systems they already own and how to prove value back to the business.
That is a different conversation. It requires someone who can see more than the product.
Adams is uniquely positioned for that shift. Consilio works across large legal departments, industry verticals, technology providers, managed services, consulting and flexible legal talent. That gives him a view most buyers do not have from inside one department and most vendors do not have from inside one product. He sees the legal teams trying to modernize, the providers trying to define their AI road maps, the workflows still stuck in email, the data problems hiding underneath the tool conversation and the talent gap forming between legal expertise and legal engineering.
His conclusion is practical: the next phase of legal AI will not be won by awareness. It will be won by execution.
AI has expanded the art of the possible, but possibility alone does not move work off a lawyer’s desk. Legal departments still have to decide which workflows are ready, which data is usable, which systems need to connect, which vendors can actually help, what level of human review is required and what metric will show whether the effort worked.
For Adams, that is where the market is maturing. The question is no longer whether a tool can do something impressive in a controlled setting. It is whether the department can turn that capability into a governed workflow that saves time, reduces friction, improves routing, lowers cost or frees lawyers for higher-value work.
That is why the AI conversation has become less about tools alone and more about judgment.
Most in-house legal teams are not starting from zero. They already have contract lifecycle management systems, enterprise legal management systems, legal intake tools, bill review platforms, matter systems, workflow tools, Microsoft or Google environments and outside providers with AI road maps of their own. New tools may be needed. Some will be necessary. But Adams’ starting point is more basic: What is already in place, how much of it is being used, what data sits inside it and what problem is the department actually trying to solve?
That is the difference between hunting and farming.
The hunter scans the market for the next AI product. The farmer works the stack already in the ground.
Legal departments need both instincts. They cannot ignore the market. The technology is moving too quickly, and some of the new capabilities are real. But they also cannot let market surveillance become a substitute for strategy. A department may be chasing a new tool for intake, triage, routing, contract review or workflow automation when some of that capability already exists inside a current provider, a near-term vendor road map, a Microsoft or Google environment or a system that was never fully configured, adopted or connected.
That is where Adams is especially clear. The buying question should come after the operating question.
What work is too manual? What work is too repetitive? What work is clogging the legal department without requiring the highest level of legal judgment? What data does the department need to use? Where does that data live? Who reviews the output? What risk tolerance applies? What will count as success?
Those questions sound basic. They are not. They are the difference between experimenting with AI and operationalizing it.
Adams’ practical answer is to begin with high-volume, lower-risk work. That may include NDAs, legal intake, triage, routing, first-pass summaries, interview notes, action plans, repetitive contract tasks and administrative workflows. These are not always the flashiest AI use cases. But they are often the work that keeps legal teams from becoming the strategic business partners they say they want to be.
That also makes governance more realistic. Legal departments do not need to begin by handing AI their highest-risk judgment calls. They can define narrower use cases, establish acceptable accuracy thresholds, keep humans in the loop, test outputs, improve the workflow and measure the result.
Perfection is the wrong standard. Discipline is the right one.
That discipline also requires a more mature view of the product-versus-platform debate. AI has blurred the old categories. Vendors can claim broader capability because the technology itself is flexible. But “we can do anything” is neither a product nor a legal strategy. Legal departments still need defined use cases, structured data, workflow design, governance rules and people who know how to put the pieces together.
That is why Adams’ orchestration point matters. The AI challenge is not simply choosing among tools. It is connecting tools, data, providers, workflows, lawyers and business outcomes in a way that legal departments can trust, explain and measure.
Consilio’s role in that market is not only advisory. It is connective. Adams describes a function that sits between the legal department, the technology market and the work itself: assessing current systems, reading vendor road maps, identifying where existing tools can do more, bringing in new technology where needed, designing workflows, supporting implementation and helping departments show whether the investment produced value.
The talent piece is becoming central. Adams points to rising demand for lawyers and legal professionals who can work across platforms, help build AI use cases, support testing and implementation and serve as the human-in-the-loop layer where governance meets execution. Consilio’s lawyers-on-demand business gives that observation practical weight: the market increasingly needs flexible legal talent that understands both the substance of legal work and the technology changing how that work gets done.
The same is true of ROI. Legal departments are under pressure not only to use AI but to show what changed. Time saved, cost reduced, cycle time shortened, intake improved, work routed more effectively, outside counsel spend affected, lawyers redeployed to higher-value work — those measurements are becoming part of the legal AI conversation.
That is the real turn in the market.
The first wave of legal AI was about attention. The next wave is about execution. Legal departments now need to absorb the market without being consumed by it, use what they already own before buying blindly and build the governance, talent and measurement systems that turn AI from possibility into work.
The demo still matters. But the demo is not the strategy.
The strategy is knowing what happens next.
—
Chris Adams is Senior Vice President, Integrated Business Solutions at Consilio, where he advises enterprise legal departments on turning AI ambition into governed, measurable execution. His work spans legal operations, managed services, consulting, technology providers and flexible legal talent. Adams focuses on the practical judgment layer of adoption: aligning systems, data, workflows, governance and people so new capabilities become trusted legal work.