The methodology guide every in-house lawyer needs before using AI on real work.Written by an attorney who has held the in-house seat at every stage - sole staff judge advocate at a joint Department of Defense and Department of State Marine Corps unit, only Associate General Counsel and later Vice President and Divisional General Counsel at a publicly traded manufacturer, and General Counsel of an early-stage technology company - this book teaches the disciplines that separate responsible AI use from the negligent use that gets lawyers sanctioned.
This is not a sales pitch for artificial intelligence. It is a methodology. ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini can compress hours of in-house work into minutes. They can also produce hallucinated case citations, confidentiality waivers, and discovery exposures the company will eventually trace back to the legal department. The difference is the framework the lawyer brings to the tool.
Inside the book:
- The four-question framework that governs every AI use: data classification, tool approval, discoverability, and judgment versus outsourcing
- A privilege-safe workflow for the corporate setting, including the Upjohn framework, the dual-hat problem, and the conservative analysis for consumer-tier versus enterprise-tier tools
- Triage, playbooks, and AI-assisted redline review for handling contract volume at scale
- How to build and maintain a compliance program the regulators will credit
- Litigation management without redoing outside counsel's work - the discipline of being a competent client
- The four-factor make-or-buy analysis for outside counsel engagement, plus budget and quality control
- Audience-specific framing for the CEO, CFO, COO, board, and crisis-communication moments
- Department building from solo GC through enterprise legal operations
- Multi-jurisdiction practice under Model Rule 5.5, the entity-client rule under Model Rule 1.13, and the long view of an in-house career
Plus seven working appendices: AI Platform Quick Reference for In-House Counsel, a Prompt Library organized by chapter and task, a Privilege and Confidentiality Framework, a Contract Review Playbook Template, an Outside Counsel Engagement Toolkit, a Compliance Program Resource Guide, the AI Verification Checklist, and a high-level orientation to In-House Registration Regimes by State.
The methodology is platform-agnostic and version-agnostic. The Code section anchors are stable. The frameworks transfer across jurisdictions and across time. The platforms will change. The disciplines will not. The lawyer who builds them now is the lawyer positioned for the next decade of in-house practice - the decade in which AI moves from a novelty to a baseline, and the lawyers who use it well move ahead of the lawyers who cannot.
Part of The AI-Powered Professional Series from TPG Publishing. Other titles address the attorney, paralegal, law student, and specialty practice settings. Methodology guides for the practitioners building the next generation of legal practice.
This book is a methodology guide and does not provide legal advice. Verification of all legal authority against current primary sources is the reader's responsibility.
