Aniek de Vries - leading AI adoption from legal ops and why the legal team outpaced the entire company

Aniek de Vries - leading AI adoption from legal ops and why the legal team outpaced the entire company

Recorded at the Legal Geek Conference in Amsterdam, this episode features Aniek de Vries, a Legal Ops professional at Just Eat Takeaway, one of the largest food delivery platforms in the world. She works within a legal team of around seventy people spread across more than fifteen countries, with hubs in Amsterdam and London. Earlier that day, she took the stage alongside her colleague Millie Foster to share how their in-house team has embraced AI, and in this conversation with Hidde Bruinsma, she goes deeper into what that journey actually looks like from the inside. What makes this story striking is not just the tools, but the position: the legal department at Just Eat Takeaway has been the leading adopter of AI within the company, a tech company, nearly every month since April last year. Aniek explains how that happened and what it took: * Why it all starts with training, not technology, and why the team invested heavily in learning before building anything, using a driving licence analogy: you need to understand how AI works before you can use it responsibly * How the team set up a cross-functional taskforce with one lawyer from every sub-team, sharing what they learned weekly and feeding insights back across the department in monthly sessions * The shift from Gemini to Prosus's Tocon platform, which gave the legal team access to an in-house agent builder, and how that accelerated everything * Why even simple automations matter: the example of an automated signature page workflow that sounds trivial but saves the team real time every week * How they built a small chatbot to guide people through privacy assessments, and what it means for a legal department to start delivering self-service tools to the business * The hackathon where the team tried to build a triage agent that could look at incoming Jira tickets and tell lawyers whether they actually needed to act on them, based on a priority matrix, and why it did not really work but was still one of the most valuable things they did * Why data organisation comes before AI, and how the team first had to invest in getting their Jira workflows, statuses, and ways of working aligned before any AI layer could add value * The moment when people's eyes light up because they realise they can build things by talking in normal human language, and why that spark matters more than any specific tool * How leadership support and a culture of experimentation made adoption possible, not just one champion pushing from the side but managers actively encouraging their teams to learn and try * The twelve projects now on the legal team's roadmap, including Jetty, a 24/7 query tool originally introduced by HR that the legal team jumped on, plus horizon scanning, drafting support, and a major playbook project for contract negotiations Aniek offers a practical, grounded look at what AI adoption actually requires inside a large international legal team: not a single breakthrough moment, but a steady process of learning together, building small, sharing what works, and making sure the foundations are in place before scaling up. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Frans Post - The end of the pyramid, the billable hour, and why nobody is talking about it

Recorded at the Legal Geek Conference in Amsterdam, this episode takes on the question that most law firms are quietly avoiding: what happens to the business model when AI takes over the work that juniors used to do? Frans is a legal management consultant and former Clifford Chance professional who advises law firms on strategy, pricing, and operating models. He has spent twenty years thinking about how legal services are produced and sold, long before AI made the conversation urgent. In conversation with Hidde Bruinsma, Frans lays out why the traditional law firm pyramid is under existential pressure, and why almost nobody in the profession is willing to say it out loud: * Why the bottom of the pyramid, trainees and junior associates, will be the first to go, and what that means for firms that have built their entire economics around billing a thousand hours per junior per year * The math that nobody wants to hear: clients are paying roughly 250,000 euros a year for someone straight out of university, and Frans asks plainly why any client would keep doing that * Why the billable hour is not a measure of value but a calculation trick designed to guarantee partner income, and why even so-called "fixed fees" are just the same hours repackaged * How Clifford Chance was already experimenting with annual retainers and product-based billing twenty years ago, models that most firms are only now beginning to consider * The story of a law firm that started charging clients for document storage by the byte, and the partner who said "that's not us" until it worked and turned into free money * Why KPMG once walked into a law firm and announced a technology surcharge on their audit fees, and what that tells you about how other industries think about pricing * How young lawyers are already asking firms in interviews how much they use AI, and walking away from firms that don't have an answer * Why law firms never needed marketers, strategists, or business developers, the partner model was self-sustaining for thirty years and why that's now becoming a vulnerability * The question Frans puts to every firm he works with: why does a client come to you? Not because of your AI, but because of who you are and the example of Arne Grimme at De Brauw, who clients seek out for reasons that have nothing to do with technology * Frans' closing advice: take a day off, sit back, and seriously think about what happens when 40% of your work can be done by a machine. That question, he says, is where it all starts Frans offers a blunt, experience-backed perspective on why the legal profession's business model is more fragile than it appears and why the firms that start rethinking now will be the ones still standing when the volume shift hits. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Hans Albers - The growing gap in legal AI adoption and why strategy matters more than tools

Recorded at the Legal Geek Conference in Amsterdam, this episode gets to the heart of why so many legal AI projects stall after the first workshop. Hans Albers, Director of Legal Management Consulting & Managed Services at Deloitte Legal, advises law firms and in-house legal teams on AI strategy, operating models, and change management. Before Deloitte, he led worldwide legal operations at Juniper Networks and served as EMEA General Counsel at both Juniper and Cisco. In conversation with Hidde Bruinsma, Hans shares what he sees on the ground when legal organisations try to make AI work: * Why law firms are adopting AI faster than in-house teams, and why competition is driving that speed in a way that internal legal departments simply don't feel * The firm where senior associates were quietly thriving with AI but didn't dare mention it, because the partners above them weren't ready for that conversation * How a workshop with one law firm's leadership revealed that the tone from the top was positive all along, they just hadn't realised it needed to trickle down * Why "communication, communication and communication" is Hans's answer to every AI adoption question, and why one business case presentation is never enough * How an insurance company went from months of manual claims review to processing ten thousand documents in two weeks, at a price the client would actually pay * Why lawyers treat AI like a finished product they can buy and install, and why even the iPhone after 25 years is still not done * The temptation of building your own legal AI tool with Copilot and Office 365, and why Hans has seen it go wrong: "The man who built it left five years ago, so we have no idea how to fix it" * Why junior lawyers should be training the partners, not the other way around, and the co-creation model that makes that work * How AI is quietly threatening the billable hour from two sides: firms can no longer charge for work that takes minutes, and clients are starting to do it themselves * Why "start small" is only half the advice, the other half is to stop thinking about efficiency and start rethinking how legal services are delivered entirely Hans offers a refreshingly practical perspective on what legal AI adoption actually requires, not just the right tool, but the strategy behind it, the patience to keep communicating, and the willingness to accept that the product will never be finished. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Joris Willems - AI at NautaDutilh and why you need to get comfortable being uncomfortable

Recorded at the Legal Geek Conference in Amsterdam, this episode is a front-row seat to how one of the Netherlands' leading law firms is navigating the AI revolution from the inside. Joris Willems, partner and head of the Technology Group at NautaDutilh, has been a tech lawyer for over 25 years, and even he had to walk on his toes to keep up. In conversation with Hidde Bruinsma, Joris shares the real story behind NautaDutilh's AI journey: - How NautaDutilh got embedded inside Prosus' AI engineering team during the build of their internal tool Toqan, not writing memos from the sidelines, but joining standups and design decisions - The deliberate choice to first build their own AI tool with a startup, before switching to Legora for firm-wide rollout - The "AI virus": how organic adoption made it impossible to take the tool away, and how that became the smartest pitch to the partnership - Why two junior lawyers chatting at the in-house barista about a five-minute Legora translation says more about the future than any strategy deck - The generation gap: juniors who embrace AI instantly versus senior partners who are still processing what just happened - How the profession will change and why nobody, including Joris, has all the answers yet - Why value-based billing will replace the billable hour as the default, and what that means for firm economics - The culture of a 302-year-old firm where senior partners see themselves as custodians handing the keys to the next generation, not owners protecting their share - What it was like negotiating with OpenAI when the Italian regulator suddenly intervened mid-call - Why "get comfortable being uncomfortable" is Joris' most important advice for young lawyers, and why it has nothing to do with AI Joris offers a refreshingly candid perspective on what it actually takes to land AI inside a traditional law firm, not just the tooling, but the culture, the patience, and the willingness to experiment while the profession reinvents itself around you. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Bert Vries - Lessons from one of legal's biggest AI deployments

Recorded at the Legal Geek Conference in Amsterdam, this episode takes you inside one of the largest generative AI rollouts in the legal industry. Bert Vries, Director of Information Technology & Innovation at CMS Netherlands, led the global deployment of Harvey across 7,000+ lawyers in over fifty countries a journey that started with a simple email in 2023 and is still going. In conversation with Hidde Bruinsma, Bert shares the real story behind CMS's AI transformation: - How CMS went from pilot to global rollout, and why it took two and a half years - The shift from horizontal, firm-wide AI features to vertical, practice-specific use cases - Why Banking & Finance uses Harvey differently than Labor Law or Corporate M&A - The concrete example of reviewing 10,000 invoices and why no lawyer signs up for that - How AI doesn't just drive efficiency, but can genuinely improve the quality of legal advice - Why the ROI of legal AI isn't measured in euros saved, but in changing how people feel about their work - How the billable hour model is being challenged, and why Bert believes in a nuanced, hybrid approach to pricing - What the dotcom era taught Bert about innovation hype and why today's AI wave feels eerily familiar - Why so many firms get stuck in analysis paralysis, and Bert's Columbus analogy for breaking free - How CMS chose Harvey: no lengthy RFP, no feature matrix just experimentation and momentum Bert offers a refreshingly honest perspective on what it actually takes to land AI in a global law firm, not just the technology, but the patience, the conversations, and the willingness to experiment while others are still analysing. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.