Prefer to listen? Catch Sidd and Aaron on the OnPoint of View podcast, where they cover their key takeaways in full.
Evolve or Get Left Behind: Designing the Future Ready Legal Ops Team
At CLOC 2026, Jean Yang, Vice President of GTM Strategy and AI Transformation at Onit, sat down with two legal operations navigation AI transformation at scale:
- Siddharth Shah, Director of Technology, AI & Automation at Intel
- Aaron Van Nice, Vice President of Legal Affairs, Regulatory & Compliance - Operational Excellence at ADM
The conversation covered three themes: AI transformation roadmaps, workforce and talent evolution, and how the legal department itself is evolving.
The Mandate is Real
Jean opened with a question she regularly poses to Onit’s AI peer group: how many of you have a mandate to use AI in your legal teams?
Almost every hand in the room went up.
But when Onit surveyed that same peer group, only about half had actual budget to act on that mandate.
That gap between expectation and investment is the defining tension for legal ops leaders right now.
The Two Year Vision
For Aaron Van Nice, the roadmap started with the administrative barrier.
His team is now working across the seven areas shown above, each one a building block toward the virtual lawyer, where business users generate first drafts and negotiate within approved guardrails and escalate to Legal only when human judgement is genuinely required. Today, Aaron is hiring legal engineers, a role that reflects the new skills the work demands.
“It really is about how we can increase capacity,” Aaron explained, “allowing us to either shift work in or focus on proactively managing risk - minimising the amount of legal work we do in the first place.”
The first use case prioritised by ADM was not about tool deployment. It was education, making sure attorneys understood what AI could do, and what their outside counsel could do for them with AI.
Build the Orchestration Layer
Intel's journey looks different. Sid Shah and his team have tackled nearly 60 AI use cases across six centres of excellence, spanning contract lifecycle management, e-billing, e-discovery, intake, spend management, and more.
For Intel, legal technology is not about making more tools but making smarter connections between the tools already in place.
"Most of the vendors on the floor have their own AI roadmap," Sid noted. "Our vision is to build an orchestration layer on top of those tools."
Intel's model works like this:
- A legal professional comes to a single interface.
- Enters a prompt: reviewing a contract, checking an invoice, querying a policy
- An agentic framework routes that request to the right tool or data source behind the scenes.
The user doesn't need to know which system holds the answer. The agent handles it.
What to use when
Not every problem requires a generative AI solution.
Jean points out "we’ve made that mistake of trying to solve things with AI, where everyday software programming was actually more consistent and reliable."
Three broad categories are presented:
- Deterministic automation: ideal for structured tasks devoid of human judgement
- Semi deterministic AI workflow: suited for tasks that tasks that require some autonomy.
- Highly autonomous AI agents: designed to receive a goal and find a path to execute it.
To evolve your legal team, first you need to understand which technological solution is suitable for your problem.
Evolving the Legal Department
Aaron predicts ‘over the next few years there’s going to be a big shift in who is in the legal department.’
He describes emerging technology as a force multiplier for attorneys that shifts their workload into high-value tasks. This shift is going to change the composition of legal teams. There will be a greater need for legal ops professionals and support staff to manage and oversee AI-enabled workflows.
Sid put it simply: ‘Let AI be the enabler and leave the judgement to a human.’
Resources
If you're looking to build AI literacy within your legal team or connect with peers navigating the same challenges, two resources were highlighted during the session:
- AI Literacy CPE Course - structured learning to bring your legal team up to speed on AI fundamentals
- AI Peer Group - Onit's ongoing community for legal ops leaders to share what's working, what isn't, and what's coming next
