Kate Wegrzyn Moderates AI in Law Panel: Ignore AI, Risk Your Career
On November 21, 2025, Foley & Lardner LLP partner Kathleen E. Wegrzyn was highlighted as a moderator at the Women, Influence & Power in Law conference. The Corporate Counsel article, "You Will Be the Dinosaur: In-House Leaders Call Ignoring AI a Career-Crushing Blunder," captured the tone of the discussion (subscription required). Read Corporate Counsel.
Wegrzyn led "Future-Proofing Your Career: Evolving into a Tech-Savvy Legal Leader for Tomorrow's Challenges," featuring leaders from health care, technology, defense, and real estate. Her message was clear: engage with AI or get left behind.
"We all have different levels of depth in the technology space, but staying relevant in our field means we all have to engage with it," said Wegrzyn, who helped lead development of Foley Equipped, the firm's AI-powered contract tool.
Why this matters for legal leaders
- AI fluency is becoming a baseline expectation. It touches contracting, due diligence, discovery, compliance, and client service.
- Cross-industry adoption sets new norms. Your clients are experimenting with automation and expecting the same speed, accuracy, and reporting from their counsel.
- Contracting is ground zero. AI-assisted playbooks, clause extraction, and risk scoring shorten cycle times and reduce leakage.
- Regulation is moving. Building processes that track provenance, bias, and audit trails will protect you when scrutiny increases.
- Ethics and confidentiality still rule. Vendor vetting, access controls, and human review should be mandatory in any deployment.
Practical steps to start this quarter
- Map repeatable workflows: NDAs, MSAs, DPAs, intake memos, matter summaries. Circle anything template-based or rule-heavy.
- Run a contained pilot: one matter type, one team, 60-90 days. Define success (time saved, error rate, cycle time) before you begin.
- Write an AI use policy: approved tools, data handling, confidentiality, human-in-the-loop review, and incident response. Keep it short and enforceable.
- Stand up a small AI council: legal ops, IT/security, privacy, and a practice lead. Meet biweekly. Ship decisions, not memos.
- Upskill the team: prompt fundamentals, review techniques, and risk spotting. If you need a curated starting point, see AI courses by job role.
- Measure outcomes: track turnaround time, redlines per document, and outside counsel spend. Expand only if the metrics improve.
Highlights from the panel
- Health care: PHI and vendor risk demand tight guardrails and clear data segregation.
- Technology: internal tooling is moving fast; legal must match pace without sacrificing review quality.
- Defense: provenance, auditability, and chain-of-custody are non-negotiable.
- Real estate: high-volume contracts and repetitive clauses are ripe for AI assistance.
About Kathleen E. Wegrzyn
Partner, Foley & Lardner LLP (Milwaukee). Focus areas include corporate finance and AI-enabled contracting across technology, manufacturing, supply chain, and related sectors. Email: kwegrzyn@foley.com | Phone: 414.297.5778
Related news
- Foley partners with Utah Business to host a roundtable on AI in the workplace (Nov. 21, 2025).
- Partners Nate Beaver and Kyle Faget discuss how health care and life sciences executives address contrasting state and federal regulatory processes (Nov. 20, 2025).
- Louis Lehot joins a podcast to discuss shifting private equity market dynamics (Nov. 19, 2025).
The takeaway: your legal expertise remains the foundation. Pair it with smart AI adoption, clear policy, and measurable outcomes-and you'll stay relevant while others stall.
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