Watch on demand · 26 March 2026
From legal manager to chief legal officer
150 general counsel. 4 regions. One inflection point.
The session that launched the research. 2026 is not the beginning of AI in legal, it is the tipping point: the year the distinction between a general counsel and a chief legal officer stops being semantic and starts being strategic.
Andy Mellett and Jason McQuillen work through what 150 general counsel told us, and what it means for how the function is built. 55 minutes.
What this session covered
The maturity divide
- Who is piloting and who is scaling
- Why only 6.7% have fully operationalised
- The leadership behaviours separating the early movers from everyone else
Governance and return
- Why contract review leads adoption at 94% of active users
- How 43% are cutting manual work by 21 to 40%
- Why only 8.7% of GCs own AI governance, and why that has to change
The 2026 playbook
- Scaling responsibly, and measurably
- Reallocating freed capacity toward the work that matters
- What future-ready GCs are prioritising over the next 6 to 24 months
A future-ready General Counsel in 2026 will be defined less by technical legal mastery (which is assumed) and more by how effectively they translate law, risk, and technology into business value.
Who you will hear from
Andrew Mellett
CEO, Plexus
Jason McQuillen
Partner, Legal Optimisation Consulting and AI Advisory, MinterEllison
Take it with you
The slides from the session, and the research the whole series runs on.
Next session
Also in this series
14 May 2026
The compounding gap: stop piloting, start operating
- Andrew Mellett, Plexus
- Jason McQuillen, MinterEllison
- Ivana Kovacevic, Group General Counsel
