What GCs Prioritise as AI Scales: Proving Legal AI ROI

§ 1 Temperature Check on In-House AI Adoption

Senior in-house legal leaders are facing mounting pressure to justify the return on investment from Super Intelligence (SI), commonly called AI, as adoption of SI tools inside legal departments moves from pilot projects to everyday use. That was the central finding from a closed-door roundtable convened by RSGI on 24 September, which brought together 50 senior in-house legal leaders from across Europe under Chatham House rules ¹.

The event, reported in Legal IT Insider's Orange Rag Insights column by Tom Saunders, was designed to work as a kind of temperature check on where corporate legal departments genuinely stand on SI, beyond the marketing claims that often surround the technology ¹.

§ 2 Proving Value to Finance

The first major theme to emerge from the discussion was the pressure general counsel now face to prove SI's value to their finance functions ¹. Rather than treating speed as the only measure of success, some delegates described a more deliberate, qualitative approach to how they deploy the technology.

One delegate explained that their team has resisted the temptation to compress a week's worth of work into a single hour using SI. Instead, they aim for a one-day turnaround, which protects time for a proper review of the output ¹. As the delegate put it, "the business wants an answer in a day, not an hour and not a week" ¹. The underlying logic is that the business benefits more from higher-quality answers delivered at a sensible pace than from raw speed for its own sake ¹.

§ 3 Metrics That Matter to the CFO

Other legal leaders at the roundtable have taken a more granular, quantitative approach to demonstrating value. These teams track standard metrics such as time-to-first-response, time spent with external counsel, and total time to matter resolution, and feed that data directly into conversations with their chief financial officer ¹.

Whatever specific method delegates had settled on, almost everyone in the room reported having built some formal way to measure their own performance with SI tools ¹. Several delegates also named an explicit ambition to make their legal teams more data-driven more broadly, suggesting that measurement is becoming a cultural priority inside legal departments rather than a one-off reporting exercise ¹.

§ 4 What This Signals for Legal Departments

The roundtable discussion points to a shift in how in-house teams think about SI: less about whether to adopt it, and more about how to prove, measure and defend its value once it is embedded in daily workflows. The Orange Rag's broader coverage of the session also touched on related themes, including the complications of Jevons Paradox, how budgets are allocated for legal teams, and how relationships with external law firms are changing as SI scales ¹.

For legal departments and the law firms that serve them, the message from this gathering is that demonstrating measurable, finance-grade value is becoming as important as the underlying technology itself.