Cybersecurity regulations
Possibly in response to the bailout of Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) which suffered a debilitating cyberattack earlier this year, the government has progressed its Cyber Security and Resilience Bill. It will mandate critical national infrastructure providers – such as hospitals, energy and water suppliers – with ensuring a minimum level of standards
I spoke with Jenn McCarron, the Co-Founder & CEO of Contracts.ai, a platform that bridges the data gap between legal and finance by transforming contracts into structured, actionable intelligence powering enterprise decision-making. We discussed the technology development process, how Contracts.ai differs from a CLM and a legal AI tool, and advice for legal teams
This week on The Geek in Review, we sit down with Jennifer McIver, Legal Ops and Industry Insights at Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions. We open with Jennifer’s career detour from aspiring forensic pathologist to practicing attorney to legal tech and legal ops leader, sparked by a classic moment of lawyer frustration, a slammed office door, and a Google search for “what else can I do with my law degree.” From implementing Legal Tracker at scale, to customer success with major clients, to product and strategy work, her path lands in a role built for pattern spotting, benchmarking, and translating what legal teams are dealing with into actionable insights.
Marlene pulls the thread on what the sharpest legal ops teams are doing with their data right now. Jennifer’s answer is refreshingly practical. Visibility wins. Dashboards tied to business strategy and KPIs beat “everything everywhere all at once” reporting. She talks through why the shift to tools like Power BI matters, and why comfort with seeing the numbers is as important as the numbers themselves. You cannot become a strategic partner if the data stays trapped inside the tool, or inside the legal ops team, or inside someone’s head.
Then we get into the messy part, which is data quality and data discipline. Jennifer points out the trap legal teams fall into when they demand 87 fields on intake forms and then wonder why nobody enters anything, or why every category becomes “Other,” also known as the graveyard of analytics. Her suggestion is simple. Pick the handful of fields that tell a strong story, clean them up, and get serious about where the data lives. She also stresses the role of external benchmarks, since internal trends mean little without context from market data.
Greg asks the question on everyone’s bingo card, what is real in AI today versus what still smells like conference-stage smoke. Jennifer lands on something concrete, agentic workflows for the kind of repeatable work legal ops teams do every week. She shares how she uses an agent to turn event notes into usable internal takeaways, with human review still in the loop, and frames the near-term benefit as time back and faster cycles. She also calls out what slows adoption down inside many companies, internal security and privacy reviews, plus AI committees that sometimes lag behind the teams trying to move work forward.
Marlene shifts to pricing, panels, AFAs, and what frustrates GCs and legal ops leaders about panel performance. Jennifer describes two extremes, rigid rate programs with little conversation, and “RFP everything” process overload. Her best advice sits in the middle, talk early, staff smart, and match complexity to the right team, so cost and risk make sense. She also challenges the assumption that consolidation always produces value. Benchmarking data often shows you where you are overpaying for certain work types, even when volume discounts look good on paper.
We close with what makes a real partnership between corporate legal teams and firms, and Jennifer keeps returning to two themes, communication and transparency, with examples. When an AFA starts drifting, both sides raise their hands early, instead of waiting for invoice rejection drama. When a client invests in “law firm days” that include more than relationship partners, the firm learns the business context, the work improves, and outcomes improve. Jennifer’s crystal ball for 2026 is blunt and useful, data first, start the hard conversations now, and take a serious look at roles and skills inside legal ops, because the job is changing fast.
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Listen on mobile platforms: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube
[Special Thanks to Legal Technology Hub for their sponsoring this episode.]
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: Jerry David DeCicca
Transcript:
Computerworld.com reported that “Silicon Valley is abuzz with chatter about Google’s upcoming AI glasses. The trigger was a big announcement on The Android Show on December 8. The company announced that its first AI glasses will be developed in collaboration with partners like Warby Parker, Samsung, and Gentle Monster, and should launch
Here are some of the regulatory developments of significance to broadcasters from the past week, with links to where you can go to find more information as to how these actions may affect your operations.
Good Sunday afternoon from Seattle . . . Our weekly Online Travel Update for the week ending Friday, December 12, 2025, is below. This week’s Update includes a number of updates to stories we featured previously, including stories on the existential threat (or not) to OTAs posed by new AI platforms and the Trump administration’s
As detailed in a recent guest post on this site, authorities in a variety of jurisdictions around the country and around the world are grappling with the right approach to regulate AI. Several U.S. state legislatures, including those in California, Colorado, Utah and Texas, among others, have already enacted AI-specific laws. Now, on December 11, 2025, the White House issued a new Executive Order entitled “Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence” (here). The new EO seeks to override or preempt state laws on AI in favor of unified federal regulation. As discussed below, the order raises a number of concerns and may face both resistance and court challenge.
So what you’re telling me is that AI chatbots can spout so much bullshit, so fast, and so confidently that they are incredibly effective at changing people’s political beliefs?
The post Worth Reading – AI can change political opinions by flooding voters with real and fabricated facts appeared first on Mike McBride Online. If
Business leaders from Unilever, EY, and NBC Universal shared a consistent message at the AI Summit: embrace the ‘I don’t know’ and think holistically about AI transformation.
The contrast with how most law firms approach AI couldn’t be more striking. While other industries talk about reimagining entire workflows, legal still treats AI as something to
What “lockup” tells you about your bottlenecks
Before you dig into specific bottlenecks, it helps to understand the big-picture metric that shows how much your processes are costing you: lockup.
Lockup measures how many days’ worth of your annual revenue are tied up as unbilled work or unpaid invoices. In other words, how long it