Hi there, 

After months of searching - research on your own, demo calls with your legal team, making the business case to your GC - you’ve finally found the perfect AI tool. It’s going to save everyone on your team a bunch of time (if they adopt it, that is).

You send an email to Finance and IT for the final sign-off, with your GC cc’ed, then you move onto other work, excited to be helping your company become more AI first (it’s a company priority, according to your CEO!).

Then, you hear your inbox ping. Finance is pushing back, saying that they just rolled out Gemini company wide, so you should try that out before you ask for a lot of money to buy a tool that’s only relevant for Legal. IT chimes in: apparently the tool you’ve chosen is lacking one specific privacy certification (that’s not even relevant!) that Gemini has, so it’s going to be an uphill battle to get that approved, too.

Suddenly, your AI plan seems poised to crumble.

How do you avoid this? Well, it probably makes sense to get stakeholders from other departments involved earlier in the process, for one. But, company-wide roll-outs are big investments and often have powerful champions behind them that need to hit aggressive adoption metrics, given the spend involved. Here are a few tips:

1. Make sure your GC is really in your corner - position a new tool or initiative as a big win for them, showing that they’re an AI leader on the executive team.

2. Get other departments involved early, so you don’t waste time just to get blocked at the last minute.

3. Test out the company-wide tools, too, and make sure you’ve created a compelling case for why they don’t fit your use cases, from a functionality or data privacy point of view. And be open to them actually being a good solution, too!

4. Be a ringleader, not a hero: if your GC is on board and other departments are looped in, that’s a start, but make sure you have allies from across the Legal department fully bought in and ready to go to bat to get your tool approved.

If you follow these steps, success isn’t guaranteed, but it’s much more likely.

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