Legal Leaders Exchange - Podcast episode 36

In this episode of Legal Leaders Exchange, host Jen McIver speaks with David Cambria, Vice President of Legal Operations at Epic Advisory, and Eve Vlemincx, Course Facilitator and Coach at Stanford University Graduate School of Business, about how AI is reshaping the future of outside counsel management. Rather than focusing on the latest AI tools or use cases, the discussion challenges legal professionals to think more deeply about strategy, culture, information architecture, client needs, and organizational readiness.

The conversation explores what truly creates value in the attorney-client relationship as routine legal work becomes increasingly automated. Cambria and Vlemincx stress the growing need for law firms to differentiate themselves through judgment, strategic thinking, and proactive collaboration rather than commoditized legal production. Ultimately, the speakers encourage legal departments and law firms to start with a clear vision of what they want to become in the age of AI and then align their technology, processes, and partnerships to support that future.

Key takeaways:

• AI success starts with business strategy, not technology adoption.
• Efficiency gains alone do not create transformational change.
• Client needs should guide innovation and technology decisions.
• Human judgment and strategic thinking remain key differentiators.
• Data creates value when it drives informed decisions and action. 

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the 36th episode of Legal Leaders Exchange. In this session, Jen Mciver is joined by David Cambria, Vice President of Legal Operations at Epic Advisory, and Eve Vlemincx, Course Facilitator and Coach at Stanford University Graduate School of Business. As AI continues to redefine how legal work gets done, the conversation has largely centered on tools and adoption. But David and Eve argue that the more important questions run deeper, touching on strategy, culture, information architecture, and what legal departments and law firms actually want to become in the age of AI. This discussion challenges conventional thinking about outside counsel management and offers a clear-eyed framework for building partnerships that deliver real, lasting value. Now, let's hand it over to Jen.

Jen McIver

Thank you, Greg. For years, outside counsel management has focused on rates, budgets, staffing models, billing guidelines, and relationships. Today, AI, however, is forcing legal departments and law firms to rethink something much bigger: what clients actually value, and what work should be performed by humans, and what it truly means to be a strategic partner. Much of the conversation in the market today, out at industry events, during podcasts like these, focus on technology, and of course, more specifically, AI. Which tools are being adopted? Which firms are using AI? And which legal departments are further ahead? But I'm going to have to admit that sometimes I wonder if that's the right conversation. For me, a more interesting question may be whether the legal industry is confusing efficiency with transformation. It's clear AI is incredibly powerful at handling predictable work, but technology alone doesn't create strategic value, stronger partnerships, or those better business outcomes. Organizations that appear to be pulling ahead are often the ones with the strongest fundamentals, the clearest understanding of the problems they're trying to solve, and a willingness to rethink how work is delivered. Today, we're joined by two industry leaders, David Cambria and Eve Vlemincx, who spend their time helping legal departments and law firms navigate exactly these questions and thoughts. During today's conversation, we'll explore what organizations may be getting wrong about the future of outside counsel management, how client expectations are changing, and what legal departments and law firms need to become what they actually need to become. And I know that sounds weird, but I think that's a big piece of the conversation today. In a world where AI increasingly handles predictable work, and humans are expected to deliver probably something of a bit more value. That's what I really want to unpack today. So, Eve and David, thank you so much for joining.

Eve Vlemincx

Thank you so much for having me.

David Cambria

Thank you, Jennifer.

Jen McIver

I really wanted to set the stage because I feel like today we have something special with having the two of you on our conversation, and right now, I'm going to jump right in because I think that everyone seems to agree that AI is going to change legal services. But to be honest with you, I want to know where do you think the market maybe is misunderstanding what's actually happening today versus what people are speculating is going to happen in the future. So, Eve, I'm going to push that to you to start. And what are your thoughts on that? Am I even completely wrong? Is there a misunderstanding?

Eve Vlemincx

I think there is a huge misunderstanding. I think we are spending too much time predicting what AI will do tomorrow or might be able to do tomorrow, and we are not spending enough time looking at what our departments, our firms, and our organizations are failing to do today. A lot of firms and departments confuse AI readiness with adopting AI. But to be AI-ready, we need not just to focus on technology. We need to get the foundations of our firm or department right. If you don't have strategic clarity, leadership, trust, the right culture, strategic alignment, the ability to change, you simplify, accelerate the organization you already have. Technology might amplify things, but if you don't get the basics right, you might be doing and amplifying the wrong things,

Jen McIver

David. I'm kind of curious your thoughts. I know in the industry we're at a lot of similar events. Everybody, I feel like, is searching for that AI use case, that perfect use case. Do you think that fundamentally we're ready for that perfect AI use case?

David Cambria

I'm going to challenge the assumption that there is a perfect AI use case because there really isn't. Look, for me and maybe working off of what Eve shared, AI is not a procurement decision. It's a business design decision. It's about how do I use a capability to advance those things which I ought to have been doing anyways? It's the disciplines about how do I elevate what legal is doing, in a way that best aligns with the clients who you're doing it for. And in corporate law departments, that happens to be our business partners. And so today, where I see a lot of the friction is what is that ideal use case that's going to provide magical outputs? There isn't one because those outputs are really driven by what are the business objectives you're trying to help accomplish, and how do you get there?

Jen McIver

So, are legal departments – do you think they're overestimating how ready they are and law firms are for what comes next with AI? Do you think that we're jumping in too quickly, David, or do you think there's enough focus on the fundamentals and understanding the underlying strategy of legal teams?

David Cambria

I think the intentions are there. I think when people look at the advancements that they're seeing in terms of the capability, I like where some of the thinking is going in terms of the art of the possible. But yeah, when it comes down to the execution, a lot of what I'm seeing is how do I have a faster horse rather than a different way of thinking about the particular problem. And so I'm really referencing what Henry Ford used to say. If I asked my clients what they'd want, they'd say a faster horse, not envisioning the possibilities and capabilities that automobiles will have brought. Similarly, if you try to think about the work in the same way you've done, and use AI to do that faster, oftentimes you don't get the scalability you hope for because you're trying to fit an older model or rubric with a new technology that can think and do things differently than you can. And so, what I would actually say then is, how do you then change the mindset about what are the outcomes you're trying to derive, rather than the solutions you're trying to derive? And oh, by the way, is that any different than what we've been doing the last 25 years in this space? Whether it's AI, whether it's Excel or Word or Outlook, whether it's eDiscovery and those capabilities, none of that is really different. It's really just about bubbling up newer ways to advance what it is we're trying to deliver.

Jen McIver

I mentioned in my introduction transformation, and it makes me query: Just even listening to you, David, discussing that we've been doing this all along. I 100% agree with you. I wonder though, as we're looking, and I know I speak with a lot of in-house teams who are working with law firms, and they're looking for this deep transformation. Are we transforming, or are we really just becoming more efficient production shops? And I know Eve, you have some thoughts on that. So I'll go to you. What are your thoughts on production versus transformation?

Eve Vlemincx

Everybody is very focused on efficiency, but if you put AI on top of yesterday's firm, you simply get a faster version of yesterday. But that's not transformation. For transformation, we really need to dare to rethink. If AI allows me to reproduce the same memo in two hours instead of 10, I've improved production. But that doesn't mean I have transformed anything. And when it's about AI, we are all very much focused on that efficiency. Well, we should start with effectiveness. Are we doing the right things? And even if you take that further, we should not focus just on that production layer. We should take it further, not just keep doing what we always did a bit faster, because often we're not even doing the right things.

Jen McIver

So David, if a firm cuts associate hours in half through the use of AI, do you think that's becoming more valuable to the in-house legal team?

David Cambria

I think provided they have other things they're offering, which is things that AI cannot provide. So if you think about AI as accelerating to the place where the law firm can show its greatest value, which is really around judgment, insight, counsel, interpreting what they find, if they're able to get to that faster, then all of a sudden we start to have clarity on what is valuable and what are the things that I was actually buying from my law firm, I'm buying kind of a disaggregation of risk because I want their opinion on these things. I'm buying scalability across geographic regions because they have the infrastructure to do that. I'm buying practice wisdom, right? I'm buying all of those things that help differentiate that firm from everyone else who's actually using and interacting with those capabilities on a regular basis, and so are they focused on the right things and doing the right things? I think if they bring to the table those things which differentiate themselves, yes.

Jen McIver

So, what do you think? And for either you or David or Eve, what do you think separates maybe an AI-enabled law firm from a commodity or production standpoint versus potentially is there a difference with maybe an AI-enabled strategic partner?

Eve Vlemincx

Yes, in my opinion, yes. Once I created the value pyramid, so to speak, to really map out what creates value in the legal industry. And then you see different layers. But the AI-driven firm, will much more focus on production, for example. A strategic partner will focus on different things. But if you don't have a clear strategy and you're all trying to do the same things, it becomes hard to differentiate that. And in law, we have a tendency to confuse business strategy with a legal strategy. If you have a great legal strategy for how to win the case or how to close a deal, that makes you a good lawyer. But that doesn't mean it makes you a good business partner. For that, you need different skills and different knowledge.

Jen McIver

David, when working with corporate legal departments and having discussions about potentially working with outside counsel or restructuring an outside counsel program, where does productivity or efficiency come with the idea of being a strategic partner? How does that weigh into a thought process of which law firm you should be working with?

David Cambria

I think it starts by looking internally about what work do I want to automate, what work do I want to delegate, what work do I want to eliminate, and what work do I want to elevate? When I understand the buckets of work I'm doing in house and where they fit into that kind of four box, it then helps me really define the relationships more clearly with the service provider, whether it's a law firm or an ALSP or something of that nature, or technology, it helps better define what are the parameters of the problem I'm trying to solve for. It's when you conflate across all four that you start to get a miss of expectations, because I'm actually not aligning those expectations to the work that I'm trying to accomplish, and oftentimes that categorization of work serves as a proxy for what do I value? And I do that in air quotes. Do I value efficiency? Do I value depth of knowledge? Do I value a better understanding of the risk? And is this something that I really need to be overly concerned with, or as concerned about, given the nature of the business I'm in? All of that comes into those calculations of how do I do I communicate that to my law firms. But it always starts with that looking inward first.

Jen McIver

You mentioned value, David, and you've said it a couple times. You've even air quoted it here recently. And for those that can't see you like I can. I saw those air quotes. You know, I look at value and I start thinking about it, and I feel like it's different from the in-house perspective and the law firm perspective. And putting this back to the technology or the AI conversation, I think what value is with the use of AI for a law firm might not be the same as what it is for a corporate legal department. So, David, do you have some thoughts just on who should benefit from value, or how that conversation should be had to understand when you're asking a firm, are you using AI? What does that actually mean for the in-house team?

David Cambria

It's a good question. I think you start on the honest understanding that the incentives are not aligned, and so what a law firm feels is valuable may not be exactly what a law department feels is valuable, or at times maybe at odds. But the reality of it is, the best partnership models that I've seen built and developed actually take into account the needs of both. Right? Yes, I need effective and efficient outside counsel involvement in my legal matters, but I also need the firm to be around and have the lights on, right? And so it has to win for both. And so starting with that as a basis that we're going to go into this figuring out how it becomes a win-win is important. So you start to align then on what are the things that would demonstrate success in those relationships, right? And that that is about what is the quality of work we're getting, but also the quality of work we're delivering as a firm. What are we doing to advance the goals and objectives of the law department in advancing the business, but also as a law firm? If I'm helping you do that, what are you doing to help bring me along in those particular things? Then, based on that, you start talking about what tools can we leverage to either deliver what we're doing better with less friction, back office stuff, or deliver what we're doing with more clarity, front office stuff, around content. But then also thinking about how do we actually take those tools and capabilities and rethink about what does the ultimate outcome look like that actually helps drive those changes and drive some of that transformation. Things like here's some risk or errors of law that we haven't talked about or thought about for expanding your business. Here's some hypotheses we could run with and explore in terms of what that might mean for the growth of your business, service lines, acquisitions, things you're looking at. Here's some information we've gathered with regard to horizon scanning and things on the future that maybe you haven't thought about, but you might want to think about because they pose a risk to your organization. Getting those at scale, allowing me to iterate on those, a much faster iterative way, I think, really builds some of that partnership, and then again, you get alignment on what those goals and incentives are that provide, air quotes again, value.

Jen McIver

I love the air quote value. I think we're gonna have some sort of a name in the podcast for that, and or a hashtag. Just your thoughts. You work with a lot of law firms. You work with in-house, as well. Quite often, when I'm talking to in-house legal teams, I'm always suggesting that they ask the law firms. I find that quite often, if you don't ask the law firms, they really don't know what you're looking for. But I feel like you have a little bit different of a perspective on whether corporate in-house teams should have to go to their law firms and ask for the innovation.

Eve Vlemincx

I think in the legal departments, if they have to ask their law firms, that's a baseline. But that also means the law firms are not necessarily very client-centric. Client centricity is not about compliance. It's about anticipation. It's about understanding what your client needs, what are the problems your client is dealing? What are they expecting from you? So if you're waiting until the client asks you what to do, you're actually running behind the facts, and that doesn't make you very proactive, but it also doesn't make you client-centric, and that's a real challenge.

Jen McIver

And so, do you think that client should begin with the AI conversation, or do you think that there's a deeper conversation to be had?

Eve Vlemincx

Oh, I should start with what's the problem and the client experience, because also when it's about AI, we see a lot of law firms are solving problems that they never had, their clients never had, but the problems that are there don't get solved. So that's a serious misalignment, and if you don't understand what your clients need from you, where their frustrations are, how you can solve that and create that better service and delivery and whatnot, then you're running behind the facts, and it's a misalignment. And if it's about differentiator in the legal market and in that AI world, that's where the obsession should be. Much more than which tool should I buy? First, understand the problem. First, understand what your clients need, and then see which tool you can add to solve that.

David Cambria

What Eve describes is actually not different than when you think about what practice areas am I in, or what am I offering? Your best performing law firms have this idea and notion that they should be demand led, not supply led. And so, how often do we actually interact with our law firms, and they say, "I've got the best team that does this, and I've got great resources that do that, and you sit there with a blank stare and say, "Actually, I don't really care. That's not a problem. Why don't you think about what my demands and needs are and try to fill those? And that's where I think in-house folks have a very important and unique role to play, where they've actually been sitting a little flat-footed in recent days, which is about being clear about what some of those demands need to be, and what problems can they help address, so that the law firms have a better sense of what direction they want to, or should be going in, whether it's their AI journey, their practices, or whatnot. And I think for the first time in a long time, a lot of the in-house folks have been a little bit quieter than they normally have been in that regard. And I would say, by and large, the law firms react well to hearing some of that input and insight. Despite all we're thinking of, despite all we think about or joke about, the law firms ultimately are service organizations trying to figure out how best to serve, and again, doing that from a seat of being demand-led and supply-led gets them on that journey in a very productive way.

Eve Vlemincx

Yes, to build on that demand-led, not too long ago I was in a partner meeting, and the partner said we don't need to be client-centric; just wait till the clients ask. But it's a very reactive thing, and I think it's also a wrong interpretation of what demand-led means. Demand-led doesn't mean that your demand cannot be very client-centric and that you cannot be proactive. And for years there has been a huge misalignment that what legal departments needed was not necessarily what they found from the law firms, and this was way before we were even talking about AI. So yes, must that be in alignment? Of course, but do you, as a law firm, also really need to understand what your clients need? Yes, if they really have to start to explain the nitty gritty and all the details, how well can you really be that strategic partner?

Jen McIver

And I think where that's fascinating is going to the next level. And for me, one of the biggest, I would say, areas that AI has uncovered is how much data do we have and how much data we don't use, both on the law firm side as well as on the in-house legal side. So honestly, even on the vendor side, I think all areas of the ecosystem there's a wealth of knowledge. So, I'm wondering, is AI going to help that? Are we measuring the wrong things, David? What are your thoughts as we're talking about relationships with law firms or asking law firms for help, do you think that in-house teams are looking at the right data, or do you think they're ready to look at the data to know what to ask?

David Cambria

I think the desire to look at the data is there. I think the question about know what to ask is still somewhat evolving. I often talk about, we've gotten pretty good at understanding the what, or how to get to the what. And by what, like what's our invoice amount, what's our spend, what's the contract review count – all the different whats. Where people tend to be really lacking, and where I still spend a lot of my time is, what's the so what, and what's the now what, and what's interesting is, with AI, one I could pull in other pieces of data into that calculus that give me additional data points to triangulate on to give me more insight into the so what. Is the activity matching my docket? Is the information I have related to or properly related to the right resources in the firm? But then also the now what, which is well, why should I actually care about this more than for a nanosecond, or how do I turn that? And so what the AI is good at is putting a bit of that wisdom on the corner of every bit of information we look at to help turn it into actionability. And that's where you start to see scale not only in the actionability, but you also start to see normalization of the data. Because the other thing that AI is good at is fixing some of the sins of the past as it relates to normalization of data or classification of the data that helps you scale it in a way that's more meaningful.

Eve Vlemincx

Can I build on that? Because on the what? Yes, the what. So what? Now what? All very relevant and important. I completely echo what David says. But before that, I would also add why. Why do we want to know? Why are we measuring this? Because a lot of things-it's not necessarily about measuring the wrong things, but sometimes we mistake what's easy to measure with what's valuable to know, and those are very distinct things. It's more important. The harder questions are like, why are we doing this? How is this contributing to what we need to know? To that, so what? Now what? And what now?

Jen McIver

No, I love that, and I think that we're at that crossroads of data and strategy. And how do we bring the data into the strategy? I think it's very easy to say that we want better outcomes. It's very easy to say that we want to spend less money. We want to have less risk. But how are we leveraging the data? And I think a lot of that possibly could also be the data from the law firms. We don't see a lot of use of that, so I do think that it's a great way to bring together the AI, the data. But Eve, going back to your comments earlier, to bring back the strategy, and I think this is where you've said before, and I've heard you say it's not so much what is AI going to do for me, or what is AI going to do to accelerate. It's what do I want to become in the age of AI? So, do you want to expand on that a little bit?

Eve Vlemincx

Most conversations start with what AI can do. Well, for me, it all starts with who do you want to be in that era of AI as a firm, as a legal department, and that starts with your strategy. If you have that clarity, it becomes much easier to determine these tools are relevant for us. This is what we should be doing, or this is not what we should be doing, and so on. And if we look at who do we want to become, that's also where the differentiator will be. An AI-driven firm cannot make the same decision as a boutique firm or a full service, and it's not about one is better than the other. It's about creating that alignment of who do you want to be, because if you all make the same decisions, if these days we look at the market, most firms are organized in a very similar way, and yes, some is a bit more this or that, but they're very similar. Moving forward, that differentiator between firms will become much and much more important, and we can only achieve that successfully if we start with clear strategy.

Jen McIver

And David, what are your thoughts? If you look at the future of outside counsel management, you said earlier on in the conversation today, we're doing more of the same. But as Eve talks about what do you want to be as a law firm, what are your thoughts from the in-house perspective? Do you think that you're going to see outside counsel management changing and possibly being a little bit more different of a strategy?

David Cambria

I do, look, I continue to see it as an evolution. What we've done, but where do I see the changes? I see it in the interactions with each other. We talk about this notion of our outside counsel should be a virtual extension of our legal departments, and yet the handoffs still are pretty one-directional. I hand something over to legal, then they actually send me something back. But it's very, it's not as collaborative as we would like it to be. And so imagine a world where you are being collaborative, not only as it relates to the practitioners, but to the practice wisdom of the firm and to the core documents that exist within my organization, and using the AI to kind of stitch together the best solution for those in a world that still respects the differences in terms of our data governance and our data security, but actually shares in those common insights to come up with a meaningful solution that then the experts can both rely on. So I do think you're going to start to see this, what they call an increasing ability to handle better and more complexity, in a way that we hadn't envisioned, and so that's going to invariably then change the nature of the relationship of outside counsel to the law department.

Jen McIver

I like that, and I think that we've started to see an evolution. And I think for me, going back to something that was said earlier about AI, I think, Eve, you said it. I always look at AI as an amplification, and that could be an amplification of what you're doing well. If you have an amazing process, an amazing relationship with your law firm, how can you use AI to amplify that? I also think that AI is an amplification, unfortunately, for the negative as well. And I've said that before, or I shouldn't say the negative, but it amplifies what you're not doing well. And I think that that's what we're going to see more of moving into the future is AI really lifting and picking out the things that you can continue to go down the path. But where the transformation does need to happen, I think it's going to make it more clear than it has been before. We're getting close to time, and so what I want to do as we end our conversation today is, if you could leave one piece of advice for in-house legal teams or law firms, either way, or for the ecosystem, in preparing for the future, thinking strategically for the future, what would that one piece of advice be right now today? Eve?

Eve Vlemincx

Does it really just have to be one? I would say start with rethink. Don't just focus on efficiency. Really, dare to rethink. Focus on effectiveness. And the question is not just on what AI can do, but it's about who do we want to be in that time of AI? Because the future does not belong to those who use AI or with the most tools. It's those who are willing to put in the work to create real value in times of AI.

Jen McIver

So, David, if you have one piece of advice for legal departments in house or even law firms or the ecosystem in general for the future that they could work on today, what would it be?

David Cambria

Yeah, I would say all of this starts with IA before AI. It's about that information architecture, and what pieces do I want to bring to bear as I reimagine and evolve what I've been doing in the legal sphere to serve our clients. That also goes back to understanding what is the end in mind, and we talked about that earlier about how am I demand-led versus supply-led? That applies to our law firms, but it equally applies to our in-house law departments in serving the needs of their particular clients. And I'll leave you with this thought: very often when we do law department assessments, I ask the business folks what is legal really good at? And they have a long list of things they're really good at. And then I ask them the next question: What would you like legal to be really good at? It's very often not the same list. And using that as a way to talk about where you have alignment or misalignment is a good way to talk about how to use that tooling to help evolve to that long-scale, long-term transformation.

Jen McIver

I love that thought, David. And I know when I'm speaking with in-house teams and they're looking for process improvements, maturity improvements, I always ask the question: What's that one initiative that has rolled over every year, year after year? And why is it rolled over? Is it because it's not important, or is it because you just don't know how to tackle it, and for me, that becomes an interesting conversation, especially as you come to your, before we come to the IA/AI strategy, etc., is I think so often we've been reactive, we've been doing what we just have to do over and over again. That now is the time to take that step back. So I really do like the conversation today a lot. I think there's a lot out there. Eve with what do you want to be, David with really thinking about we're doing more of the same. Let's just, in my mind, let's just leverage it. Let's do more, but let's just kind of amplify that. Let's leverage AI to do so. So I really appreciate the two of you being on our conversation today, and I hope that you enjoyed it And thank you.

David Cambria

Thank you, Jennifer.

Eve Vlemincx

Thank you for having us. I really enjoyed it.

Greg Corombos

Thank you for joining us on this new episode of Legal Leaders Exchange. A special thank you to Jennifer McIver and to our guests David Cambria and Eve Vlemincx for sharing their expertise and challenging us to think differently about the future of outside counsel management. Please subscribe to Legal Leaders Exchange on your favorite podcast platform, and join us for future episodes.