400 in-house lawyers - GCs, CLOs and legal leaders from more than 15 industries and 20 countries - filled County Hall to wrestle with one big question: how do lawyers and AI work productively and safely together in the Operator Era?
The day covered 10+ sessions - from building your commercial edge as a creative GC, to navigating the VC landscape, avoiding tech regret, navigating parental leave and staying sane as an in-house lawyer. Here are some of the moments that kept the room on the edge of their seats.
We ripped up the old legal playbook. We uncovered the secret behind the world's hottest startup. We survived a cyber attack war room (not for the faint-hearted). We learned why we're the problem with our own AI prompts. And we heard legal ops royalty make the case that the future of legal belongs to scaleup GCs. Let's get into it.
AI arrived in legal as a copilot - helpful, but still something you directed. What's changed is the scale of what's now possible: AI that executes tasks end-to-end, autonomously, within your systems and within guardrails you design.
You're no longer doing the work - you're architecting how it gets done.
Richard Mabey and Kaveesha Thayalan from Juro brought that shift to life on stage with the launch of Operator - Juro's contract intelligence layer for smarter, faster answers from your contracts, without the manual searching [Find out more about Operator by Juro].
If one idea from the day cut through loudest, it was this one.
The conversation centred on intentionality: what should stay in-house, what should be automated, where fractional support makes sense, and how to scale without relying on heroics.
The best GCs in the room had been deliberate about the design of their function, rather than letting it evolve reactively - and that, more than any tool or budget, was what set them apart.
And the stakes couldn't be higher. Olivia Van Walleghem, Legal Counsel at Numan, was struck by Andrew Cooke's reference to the Roads to Ruin report: "Behaviours kill businesses, not structures. In the age of AI, the 'demand side' want instant answers. Legal's new mandate is to tell the story of risk - but crucially, at the pace of the business."
Joshua Blake, Founder at JHB & Partners, put it plainly: "AI isn't just making lawyers more efficient - it's changing what good legal teams look like. The skillset is shifting from pure legal production toward operational thinking, prioritisation, workflow design and commercial judgment."
No line from the day was quoted on LinkedIn more than this one - delivered in the cyber session with a vividness that made the room sit up straight.
The numbers set the scene: cyber is the #1 business risk globally, 43% of UK businesses were hit last year, and the average data breach runs to £3.4m. When the panellists asked who had a plan in place if a breach happened tomorrow - no more than a couple of hands went up.
The practical guidance: build your Break Glass document before you need it. Map your key contacts - outside counsel, lead investors, cyber insurance claims contact - and set expectations for the first 24 hours. Know your underwriter by name before you ever need to call them.
The single most important action came from Imogen Armstrong, CLO at Stelia: "IT'S NOT THE GC'S JOB to do this alone. The challenge I set the room: take your CTO or technical lead out for coffee on Monday. With any luck there are friendly meets between legal and technical happening up and down the land today."
There was a palpable buzz before the Anthropic session. A company that went from $9 billion to $30 billion in ARR in three months. Three members of their legal team on stage, talking openly about what it's like to practise law at the frontier of the AI industry.
What came through was a clear-eyed, energising read on what great lawyering looks like in this era. Legal is a craft.
The skills that define excellent lawyers - curiosity about the business you work for, strategic thinking grounded in real commercial understanding, taste and judgement in ambiguous situations - become more valuable as AI handles more of the execution.
For anyone wondering what their role looks like as AI capability grows: the sharpest value a lawyer brings is knowing how to read the room, understanding what matters to the company, and building the relationships that get you into the room before decisions are made.
Paul Gatt, General Counsel at Gentoo Media: "In a time of career 'AI-gloom' I loved Elena's take that self-awareness, curiosity and a genuine thirst to learn are the skills that will define the next generation of lawyers."
Olivia Van Walleghem, Legal Counsel at Numan: "They view commercial legal work as a genuine craft. Most importantly, they act as thought partners who seek to understand what energises their team so those passions can be woven into their daily legal work."
Stephanie Dominy, GC at Tessl: "Who exactly is an 'AI-native' hire - and how do we test for it? The Anthropic team test for resourcefulness, solutions orientation, taste and judgment. These qualities aren't correlated with seniority."
Antti Innanen - CEO of Dot/LEGIT and the man who wrote the book on prompting for legal - started with a question nobody could dodge: does anyone still use structured prompting frameworks?
The honest answer from the room was no. Because the models have changed. They're no longer junior associates that need every instruction spelled out - they're closer to experienced colleagues, and the bottleneck, almost always, is the human.
Most AI underperformance is a context problem. In what may or may not have been a planned nod to Taylor Swift: "it's me, hi, I'm the problem it's me."
Corinne Schertzinger-Morel, Senior In-House Counsel at McCain Foods, said it best: "The standout moment for me was the session on prompting - not because of shiny tools, but because it reframed something fundamental: prompting is a communication skill. The real shift is moving from prompting to orchestrating - designing workflows, review loops, and decision paths where judgment adds value."
Mary O'Carroll - CEO of LegalEng Consulting Group and former President of CLOC - closed the day with the analogy that landed hardest.
A big ship carries more. It weathers storms. But tacking a dinghy - changing direction, responding to where the wind actually is, moving fast because you can - is something a tanker simply cannot do.
Scaleup legal teams are dinghies. Stretched, sometimes battered by the chop. But sprightly. And in a moment when the legal industry is changing faster than anyone can fully map, that agility is an extraordinary advantage.
One observation from Mary's session resonated long after she left the stage - captured perfectly by Kimberley Whitaker, GC at Corti: "GCs are typically comfortable advising with imperfect information. Yet somehow, when it comes to AI, we suddenly want a human to confirm the answer is 'right' - even though they too are working from imperfect information. That feels less a technological issue and more a psychological one."
The mic drop: "You don't need to turn over every stone. You just need to know where the big rocks are."
The mood that carried out of County Hall was clear: this isn't a moment of anxiety for in-house legal - it's a moment of agency.
Perhaps the simplest takeaway of all: you're not alone in this. A room full of people grappling with the same questions, the same pressures, the same mix of excitement and energy.
Naomi Pavie, Senior Legal Counsel at Speechmatics, summed it up perfectly: "Every speaker landed on the same message: be curious, move while the ground is still moving, and don't wait for the dust to settle. The lawyers who thrive are the ones who stay agile, keep iterating, and automate to enable their businesses."
Scaleup GC 2027 is already in planning. If you want to be the first to hear when the date drops - and to keep the conversation going in the meantime - the Scaleup GC community is where to be.
1,500+ in-house legal leaders, 65+ events throughout the year, and a community of people who are all navigating the same moment.
Scaleup GC is Europe's only full-day conference by and for in-house legal teams at scaling businesses. Free to attend, made possible by our partners: Wilson Sonsini, LexisNexis, Capsule Insurance, Flex Legal, LegalEdge, JHB & Partners, Fry & Brown, and NomosFit.
Anastasia is Content & Community Marketer at Juro, with 6 years in B2B content marketing across financial services, SaaS and legal technology. She has an MSc in Strategic Marketing from Imperial College London Business School.
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