Texas Trailblazers Day Two: Where Were the Corporate Lawyers?
Day Two of Texas Trailblazers shifted from law firm operations to the in-house side. Connie Brenton, Founder and CEO of LegalOps.com, chaired the day, and Harvey served as the headline sponsor. The panels were strong, the vendors were sharp, and the legal operations professionals in the room were clearly doing meaningful work with AI. But something was missing.
The corporate lawyers themselves.
For a day built around in-house legal, there were surprisingly few General Counsels, Chief Legal Officers, or corporate attorneys bringing concrete, first-person examples of how AI is changing their practice. The operations side of the house showed up with real use cases and data. The legal side mostly watched. That gap was the most interesting thing about the day.
The software engineer parallel
John LaBarre, General Counsel of Harvey, opened with a sponsor keynote arguing that software engineers and lawyers have similar jobs. His point was that lawyers should study what is happening to engineers right now, where massive disruption is arriving alongside real opportunity, as a preview of what is coming for the legal profession over the next year or two.
Joy Heath Rush, who chaired Day One and stuck around for Day Two, offered a useful correction. She agreed with LaBarre’s destination but pushed back on the path he took to get there. Both professions are problem solvers, she said, and AI will streamline the process of solving problems. That framing works.
But there is a meaningful difference that the comparison glosses over. Software engineering outputs are testable. You run the code and it works or it does not. Legal outputs are subjective, often with multiple defensible answers, and correctness depends heavily on context, jurisdiction, and judgment. That makes the disruption pattern different, even if the general trajectory rhymes. A software engineer can tell immediately whether AI-generated code compiles. A lawyer reviewing an AI-generated analysis of a multi-jurisdictional compliance question has a much harder time knowing whether the answer is good enough to rely on.
LaBarre’s broader point, that lawyers should actively look for parallels from other professions being reshaped by AI, has substantial merit. The specific analogy just needs more nuance than a keynote slot allows.
What legal operations teams are building
The “Efficiency Unleashed in the Age of AI” panel brought together George Pawloski of ConocoPhillips, Steven Rippberger of OpenText, Jessica Vander Ploeg of Belron, Leana Lares of H1, and Justin Hoffman of DISCO. This was operations at scale: maximizing technology stacks, designing workflows that reduce friction, and aligning external counsel relationships with internal goals. The discussion was practical and well-grounded in the kind of work that makes legal departments run.
This is also where the day’s pattern started to emerge. The people doing the most interesting AI work in corporate legal departments are often not the lawyers. They are the operations leaders, the technologists, and the process designers who sit alongside the legal function. That is not a criticism. It is an observation about where the energy and experimentation are concentrated right now.
Leading legal teams in the age of AI
The afternoon panel was the day’s strongest session. Elizabeth Poole, General Counsel of Boomi; Michael Voutsinas, Chief of Staff and Managing Director of Legal Operations at Phillips 66; Justin Schwartz, Vice President and Chief Counsel, Americas at Epiroc; and Stephanie Nweke, Growth Lead at Sandstone.
Justin Schwartz described moving multi-state legal surveys to AI and finding that the results were good enough for his team to rely on, at a fraction of the traditional cost. For in-house teams managing compliance across dozens of jurisdictions, that kind of use case is immediate, practical, and directly addresses the kind of work that has historically been expensive to buy from outside counsel. If a multi-state survey that used to cost $10,000 or more can be produced using AI at a fraction of that price, and the quality holds up, the implications for outside counsel engagement are significant.
Michael Voutsinas brought examples from Phillips 66 that law firm lawyers would benefit from hearing. Two stood out. The first involved right-of-way agreements, where AI is being applied to a document type that is repetitive, high-volume, and historically time-consuming but not particularly complex in its legal reasoning. That is exactly the kind of work where AI excels and where firms should be thinking about how they deliver value. The second was legal research, where Phillips 66 is layering an LLM on top of their internal data to surface insights across their matter portfolio. Both examples illustrate a useful principle: the best in-house AI use cases start with work the team already understands deeply, where the gains are measurable and the risk is manageable.
Justin Schwartz also described starting with zero budget and building a dynamic intake system using SharePoint and Copilot that generated data on contract revenue by business unit, region, and agreement type. That operational visibility became the foundation for credibility, which she then used to justify hiring dedicated legal operations staff.
Stephanie Nweke offered the vendor perspective on where commoditization is heading, noting that redlining and document review are increasingly being handled by frontier AI models, pushing legal teams toward higher-value work like context integration, tool orchestration, and metrics-driven decision making.
But notice the pattern. Voutsinas is legal operations, not a practicing lawyer. Poole is a GC, but the win she described was operational infrastructure, not a legal practice transformation. Schwartz came closest to describing a use case rooted in the substance of legal work. The gap between what legal ops teams are building and what corporate attorneys are doing with AI in their actual legal practice was visible throughout the day.
The rate reality
Kristina Satkunas, Director of Strategic Consulting at CounselLink, presented on outside counsel spend trends. She has been tracking this data for years, and the picture she painted was familiar but sharpening.
Alternative fee arrangements remain stuck at roughly 10 percent of all outside counsel work. That number has barely moved in more than a decade, despite persistent interest from clients who say they want something different. Satkunas is ever hopeful that flat-rate fees and other alternative structures will become more normalized, but the data keeps telling the same story.
What is changing, and changing fast, is rates. Since 2022, annual rate increases have run above 5 percent, a meaningful jump from the roughly 3 percent annual increases that had been the norm before that. Satkunas suggested that by 2030, there will most likely be another normalization event in rates that could produce yet another step-change in annual increases. If she is right, the pricing pressure on in-house teams is going to intensify, not ease, even as AI tools make certain categories of work cheaper to perform.
That tension, between falling costs of production and rising sticker prices, is one of the most important dynamics in the legal market right now. And it feeds directly back into the question of whether in-house attorneys will get more aggressive about using AI to reduce their dependence on outside counsel for work that can be done internally.
Spellbook: transactional AI getting specific
During the morning break, Trevor May of Spellbook ran a product demo that showed where transactional AI tools are headed for in-house teams. Spellbook is specialized exclusively for transactional legal work and offers two products: a Microsoft Word add-in for single-document review and an agentic tool called Associate for multi-document workflows handling up to around 50 documents at once.
The playbook functionality was the most interesting part. Teams can reverse-engineer their contract standards from existing agreements, define up to three fallback positions per issue, and run automated reviews that flag where a contract meets standards and where it falls short. The tool generates rejection comments with explanations, handles redline reviews, and produces surgical edits rather than wholesale rewrites.
Spellbook also showed a Compare to Market feature that uses opt-in aggregated customer data to benchmark contract positions. For termination notice periods, as one example, the tool analyzed over 1,700 similar agreements to show that 60-day notice requirements appeared in only 9 percent of contracts, while 30 days was the plurality at 40 percent. That kind of empirical grounding for negotiation positions is useful. A newer Repository feature offers CLM-light analytics across document sets, with Google Docs support launching soon.
AI platforms and the technology roadmap
The closing panel brought together Sujatha Gurrapu of Google, Chad Hallberg of Stryker, Eric Paul of AT&T, John Rizner of Filevine, and Russel Smith of Harvey to discuss how AI platforms are reshaping legal technology strategy. The conversation addressed system selection, integration sequencing, and the challenge of adding AI capabilities without creating unnecessary complexity. For legal departments already managing multiple platforms, the question of how AI tools fit into an existing technology roadmap is becoming one of the most consequential decisions they face.
Where this leaves us
Day One was about what law firms are building. Day Two was about what legal operations teams are building inside corporations. Both days produced useful, concrete examples. But the voice that was largely absent on Day Two was the corporate attorney describing how AI is changing the substance of their legal work: the analysis, the judgment calls, the advice they give to their business.
The operations infrastructure is moving fast. The technology is advancing. The vendors are iterating rapidly. The question for 2026 is whether the lawyers these systems are built to support are moving with them. If Day Two is any indication, the answer is: not yet, at least not at the pace the operations side would like.
That is not a failure. It is a phase. The legal operations professionals who spoke on Day Two have built the platforms, the workflows, and the intake systems. They have created the conditions for their attorneys to engage with AI meaningfully. The next step is the attorneys stepping into that space and bringing back examples of their own.
A few observations from the day:
The software engineer analogy has legs, but needs refinement. The parallels between AI disruption in engineering and law are real, but the subjectivity of legal outputs creates a different risk profile. Legal teams need verification frameworks built for ambiguity, not binary pass-fail testing.
The best in-house AI use cases start with work the team already knows. Right-of-way agreements, multi-state surveys, contract intake triage. The wins are coming from applying AI to well-understood, high-volume work where the team can evaluate quality confidently.
Rate inflation is outpacing alternative fee adoption. With annual rate increases above 5 percent and AFAs stuck at 10 percent of work, in-house teams have every incentive to bring more work inside using AI tools. Whether they will is a different question.
Legal operations is carrying the AI agenda in most corporate legal departments. The lawyers will follow, but right now the innovation energy is disproportionately on the ops side.
Vendors are converging. Spellbook, Harvey, Checkbox, Sandstone, and others are all expanding their feature sets to cover more of the legal workflow. The consolidation question that hung over Day One’s vendor demos is even more present on the in-house side.
The tools are ready. The infrastructure is ready. The operations teams are ready. The lawyers are the variable, and based on what showed up on Day Two, they are still in the early innings of figuring out what AI means for the work they actually do.
Texas Trailblazers was held March 25-26, 2026 at The Statler Dallas, organized by Cosmonauts in partnership with LegalOps.com. Day One focused on private practice; Day Two on in-house operations. Connie Brenton (LegalOps.com) chaired Day Two; Joy Heath Rush (ILTA) chaired Day One.