Our key takeaways from the Association of Corporate Counsel’s annual conference

The Summize team has just returned from the Association of Corporate Counsel’s annual conference, our third consecutive year of sponsoring and attending the event, this time in Nashville Tennessee.

Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) holds one of the biggest events for in-house legal professionals across the United States. Each year, over 2,500+ General Counsels and legal teams get together for three days of legal talks, professional seminars and to see the latest in legal tech.

We’ve put together some of the top takeaways from the event, both from the seminars we attended and our conversations with the attendees.

Getting started with AI

Even though AI is a hot topic across many industries and is prevalent in both personal and professional use, ACC highlighted that its adoption among General Counsels is still lagging.

We attended one of the conference’s seminars “Getting started with AI” to understand the state of play.

Interestingly, the seminar’s panellists shared the same sentiment as Summize - AI is a powerful tool, if used in the right way and for the right use cases.

One panellist stated “I wouldn’t use AI for a complex contract, this is where my legal expertise really comes into its own. AI is the co-pilot for simple agreements and not really for complex work”.

The panellist then went on to provide examples of how AI can be used effectively - from summarising contracts to highlighting contract risks. The examples demonstrated the simplicity of AI, in terms of its use and the ability to create the output legal teams are after, but without the manual work required.

This approach is mirrored in our newly announced AI Redlining functionality, which has been designed to offer non-intrusive redlining that mirrors lawyer behaviour so the changes made can be tracked and checked. Our AI feature can be used on a multitude of contracts, but it’s the higher-volume, low-risk contracts where AI Redlining really makes a difference.

The role of security within AI

A big talking point during the conference was the challenges around AI and security. As stated in more than one seminar, AI is a powerful and highly useful tool for legal professionals, but it must be used in a secure, private way.

One seminar discussed four ways to access AI capabilities:

• Personal ChatGPT assistant
• Team/Enterprise ChatGPT account
• MS Azure OpenAI service
• Open source model on private hardware

The seminar’s speaker cautioned that using open-source models on public platforms, such as ChatGPT, could pose a risk for legal teams, as sensitive data might potentially become accessible to the public. Therefore, when using AI to aid legal tasks, such as summarising contracts, it is vital to use a private and secure AI model.

At Summize, we use siloed AI practices using Microsoft Azure. Our customers' prompts, completions, embeddings, and training data are kept exclusively for their own use. This data is not accessible to other customers or OpenAI, nor is it used to improve OpenAI models.

Such secure practices were discussed openly and often during ACC to ensure that legal teams are using AI for their advantage, and not risking the security of their business’ data.

Key takeaways from the Summize team

The majority of our learnings were gathered when speaking to the 2,500+ attendees over the course of the event’s three days. Take a look at what the Summize team learnt during ACC.

Mike Vailas, Account Executive at Summize, based in Boston USA

As we could tell from the seminar topics and talks, AI is still a major topic. Many attendees were asking us about Summize’s use of AI and how AI can be used to solve contract challenges.

At ACC, we announced our new AI Redlining feature and there was definitely a significant interest! Manual redlining can take up a lot of time for the average in-house legal team. Attendees at our booth were blown away by how Summize’s AI Redlining is all integrated into Microsoft Word and can easily reduce their contract review tasks.
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Jonny Jessop, Head of Presales, based in Manchester UK

Many businesses, especially US businesses, have Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) systems in place but from speaking to the event’s attendees, a lot of these CLM systems have not been implemented properly.

Many use their CLM just as a repository and don’t utilise all the features due to the complex nature and training needed for their CLM. This then makes business adoption a challenge.

Event attendees were mostly interested in how Summize integrates into the tools that the legal team and the rest of the business already use! In particular there was an interest with Outlook and Gmail to close the loop on email attachments within a business. This approach then covers the full pre- to post-signature contract lifecycle, which makes business adoption even easier to achieve.
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Harvey Trimble, Head of Enterprise Sales, based in Boston US

One of the main challenges in the CLM market is its sheer size - it's a crowded space, and businesses are eager to understand the key differences between CLM solutions and their overall impact.

At ACC, we demonstrated how Summize stands out by cutting through the noise of all-in-one CLMs. Our native integration into tools such as Word, Outlook, HubSpot and Gmail makes Summize incredibly easy to use across the entire business, ensuring high adoption – because ultimately, adoption is key.
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Rahul Sagger, Chief Revenue Officer, based in Manchester UK

This was my first time attending ACC, and I had heard great things about the event from our previous years of attendance.

From my perspective, it was refreshing to listen to legal professionals discuss Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM), whether it was about the absence of it in their organisations or the changes they hope to implement.

I especially enjoyed speaking with in-house legal teams about their challenges, particularly as they transition away from traditional methods of reviewing contracts. There’s always a light-bulb moment when they see the potential of what they can achieve with Summize and the native integrations that makes Summize different to the other solutions on the market.

Even more events with Summize

ACC may be over for another year, but our attendance and sponsorship at events across the world certainly isn’t!

Take a look at the range of webinars and conferences we will be sponsoring, attending and hosting for the remainder of the year in both the UK and US.