Legal Just Left the Basement: How AI Is Making the CLO the Most Powerful Person in the Room

About this episode

David Cowen interviews Russ Elmer about the transformation of the legal department through AI and the evolving role of the CLO.

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…

People in this episode

Host: David Cowen

Guest: Russ Elmer

Topics covered

• legal department transformation
• AI in law
• CLO as strategic hub
• cross-functional intelligence
• automation in legal processes
• digital twin concept
• legal engineering

Keywords

• CLO
• AI
• legal department
• automation
• cross-functional
• digital twin
• legal engineering
• ServiceNow
• strategic hub
• enterprise

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: ServiceNow

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