Innovation Is Easy. Execution Is Hard.
Legal departments have never had more technology available to them.
AI tools. Workflow automation. Advanced analytics. Unified legal platforms.
And yet transformation still stalls.
At Legalweek, Onit’s Jeffrey Solomon sat down with two legal operations leaders who know this problem well:
Jasmine Sims, VP, Global Legal Ops at IBM
Kim Wolfe, Senior Vice President – CAO for Legal and Head of Legal Operations, Contracts, and Innovation at State Street
The conversation wasn’t about the next tool. It was about something harder: executing innovation.
The Problem Isn’t Technology
Legal teams are investing heavily in systems designed to modernize operations, but many of those initiatives struggle to gain traction.
- Adoption slows.
- Workflows revert to old habits.
- The new platform becomes another system people work around.
Not because the technology is flawed. Because the organization wasn’t ready.
As the panel made clear, the biggest barrier to transformation in legal operations is rarely technical- it’s operational.
The Leaders Who Succeed Ask Different Questions
Most teams begin transformation the same way. “What technology should we buy?”
But the most effective legal ops leaders start somewhere else. They ask: “Is our organization ready to use it?”
That question changes everything. It forces leaders to understand:
- Where work breaks down.
- Where decisions slow down.
- Where legal and the business fall out of sync.
Before any automation happens or any platform goes live.
Start With Listening
Kim Wolfe explained that transformation in legal operations begins with understanding people. Every legal organization is different.
Different GCs. Different priorities. Different risk tolerances.
Solutions built without that context rarely stick. The work starts with listening.
- Where are the real friction points?
- Where does legal spend too much time?
- Where do business partners feel the pain?
Only once those answers are clear does technology become useful.
Fix the Process Before the Platform
Another mistake legal teams often make: automating a broken process.
Jasmine Sims put it plainly during the discussion.
When budgets are tight, the fastest way to unlock technology investment is to fix inefficient processes first.
Because good technology cannot repair a bad process.
Legal ops leaders who understand this sequence focus on operational clarity first. Then they automate.
Where AI Actually Helps
There’s another assumption that slows progress in legal departments. That AI will replace lawyers.
It won’t.
The legal profession runs on judgment.
Lawyers interpret context. Assess risk. Make decisions with accountability.
AI does something different. It removes the low-judgment work.
- Reviewing standard clauses.
- Scanning large contract portfolios.
- Identifying patterns across thousands of documents.
That’s where AI shines. Humans define the decisions, AI helps them get there faster while still allowing them the oversight that keeps them comfortable.
Build the Foundation First
The biggest takeaway from the Legalweek conversation was simple.
The organizations that benefit most from AI will not be the ones that deploy it first, they will be the ones that prepare for it.
That preparation looks like operational maturity:
- Asking better questions about processes and workflows.
- Governing how decisions are executed.
- Automating the work that slows teams down.
When those elements come together, legal operations stops being a reporting function and becomes something more powerful – a system of execution.
And that’s where real transformation begins.
