AI Adoption is Surging With In-House Teams: Episode 43, Sandstone Cofounder Jarryd Strydom

CLM was supposed to be the answer. It wasn’t. So what comes next?

Remember when Contract Lifecycle Management was going to be the “Salesforce of legal?” Me neither, I think it may have all been one big hallucination.

Hey there, I’m Zach Abramowitz and I am Legally Disrupted!

If you remember back to Episode 37, I talked about how I had invested in Sandstone. Investing in AI startups now is risky as hell, but if there’s a team that’s going to figure it out, it’s the Sandstone crew. They recently picked up a big check from Sequoia Capital and SV Angel and have been adding top talent to their team. Right before I recorded this conversation, Sandstone co-founder Jarryd Strydom had just gotten back from a cross-country road trip hitting up California, Seattle, and Texas just to sit down with in-house counsels and get a real pulse on the market.

Naturally, I had to bring him on to debrief for 🎙️Episode 43 of Zach Abramowitz is Legally Disrupted. We covered a lot of ground in this episode, diving into why legacy CLMs are drifting away because they require lawyers to work for the tool, rather than the tool working for them. We also talked about how AI is finally giving in-house teams the infrastructure they need to shift from reactive risk mitigation to proactive commercial strategists.

We also got into a massive vibe shift: Jarryd’s impression is that over 50% of the in-house market is now actively paying attention to AI and many are even “vibe coding.” Jarryd and I discussed the C-suite mandates pushing legal to keep up with the speed of sales and engineering, and how AI might actually revive the “Renaissance man” model for junior lawyers by allowing them to act as true legal generalists.

So, grab a hot beverage, curl up on the furniture piece of your liking and treat yourself to a dose of Sunday disruption by watching the embedded YouTube link or find Zach Abramowitz is Legally Disrupted on Apple and Spotify.

Episode 44 with Josh Schmerling from LawPro.ai has already been recorded and will drop soon as has Episode 45 with Learned Hand founder Shlomo Klapper and AAA President and CEO Bridget McCormack on AI as a judicial decision maker. So, make sure to subscribe to the podcast or follow the Legally Disrupted YouTube channel. Subscribing to this newsletter is also a good idea.

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Would you like to be legally disrupted in person? I will be keynoting the upcoming ILTA EVOLVE conference in Colorado April 30-May 2, and you can learn about the agenda and register here. I always try to prioritize newsletter subscribers, so let me know if you’re planning to attend and we can meet up.