Version Up

Kaj Rozga

One lawyer’s journey to digitally transform his legal practice.  Version Up is a podcast about deploying AI and technology in legal practice. Host Kaj Rozga — a lawyer leading innovation inside a legal team at a Global 500 — cuts through the noise to talk with the practitioners, founders, and operators actually doing the work of rebuilding the practice and business of law for the AI era. Each episode is a practical conversation about what’s working, what isn’t, and what’s worth paying attention to. No hype. No sponsored takes. Just an honest dialogue about building and deploying legal technology at law firms and corporate legal departments. For lawyers, innovation leaders, legal ops professionals, founders and investors who want the TL;DR on the state of play in legal tech. | Hosted by Kaj Rozga | Music by Brett Ryback | views my own |

  1. 5D AGO

    Flying on Autopilot: How In-House Lawyers Use AI Agents to Transform Corporate Legal Departments

    You could say in-house legal is having its AI moment. Agentic AI enables corporates to not only automate existing work but also to insource additional tasks currently bveing shipped out to external providers. It requires a change in mindset as much as an upgrade in technology. Mathieu Van Assche comes on the podcast to talk about an outcome-driven approach to helping corporate legal departments make the transition from viewing AI as a copilot to viewing it as a way to put work on autopilot.  Mathieu does GTM and strategy fpr Flank, a company that deploys AI agents inside enterprise in-house legal teams. Rather than selling a software product and walking away, Mathieu describes the need to guarantee outcomes, operating closer to how a legal service provider would than a traditional SaaS vendor. Mathieu walks through how to tackle the high-volume, lower-complexity work — NDAs, MSAs, first-pass contract reviews, intake Q&A — that quietly consumes most of a legal team's bandwidth. The agents live where lawyers already work (primarily in shared email inboxes), handle tasks asynchronously overnight if needed, and escalate for approval only what genuinely requires human judgment. The goal: get the work off the lawyer's desk without changing how the lawyer operates. Key Topics Covered: **From software to services.** Being an outcome provider rather than a software tool. This mirrors how legal service providers have traditionally been engaged — and is part of a broader market shift that investors like Sequoia are actively discussing. **The copilot vs. autopilot distinction.** There's a line between AI that assists you while you work (copilot) and AI that does the work in the background and only escalates when it needs your judgment (autopilot/agent). The goal: lawyers review and approve; they don't babysit. **Individual AI vs. institutional AI.** Individuals feel the 10x productivity boost from AI long before companies do. Bolting AI onto existing workflows won't move the needle — organizations need to rethink from first principles how work gets done. **The data layer problem.** Unlocking context buried across siloed corporate systems — emails, SharePoints, CLMs, legacy databases. This is where the next wave of agent innovation will come from - but we're not there yet. Permissions, data fidelity, and source-of-truth questions all remain hard problems. **Governance and supervision.** Everything starts supervised. Over time, as clients build trust in the agents' outputs, supervision can be relaxed and more workflows automated.  **Setting realistic expectations.** AI need not be 100% accurate before it's useful. No legal department operates at 100% accuracy today — the baseline already includes human errors, missed questions, and outsourced work.  About the Guest: Mathieu is Operations & Go-to-Market Lead at Flank ((https://flank.ai)), which focuses on deploying AI agents for enterprise in-house legal teams. His background spans corporate finance, private equity, and chief-of-staff roles at tech scale-ups. *Version Up is hosted by Kaj Rozga. Music by Bretty Ryback*

    47 min
  2. MAR 31

    AI Benchmarking: Judging LegalTech on the Merits

    Not being able to make apples-to-apples comparisons of AI tools is a major barrier to effective procurement and deployment of AI in legal. But it's also a problem for vendors who struggle to make better-performing products stand out from better-funded ones.  Anna Guo and Elgar Weijtmans, seek to solve this problem with Legal Benchmarks. Anna and Elgar joined forces after independently discovering the same problem: legal teams are choosing AI tools on vibes, marketing, and who they know, not on evidence. Their research found that purpose-built legal AI tools were not reliably outperforming general-purpose models. So they developed the Legal AI Evaluation Framework, a community-sourced assessment of AI legal tools that gives buyers a structured, defensible procurement process. Their message is two-fold. For legal enterprises and users, it's more obvious: being able to compare which AI tool is more accurate, safer, quicker will help them make better decision about which tool to buy (or whether to buy one at all). But as compelling is their value proposition for the vendors who sell these tools: improving transparency in the market allows the best products to rise to the top.  It's a great collaboration that, like many I've encountered in legal tech, links up diverse capabilities, personalities, and geographies to try to solve an acute legal world problem with a technology-driven solution. I was excited to have them on the pod and look forward to seeing what their framework has in store for the legal industry. https://www.legalbenchmarks.ai/  https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-guo-255ba7b0/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/weijtmans/

    59 min
  3. MAR 3

    Legal Quants: the Elite Legal Practitioners of the AI Era

    What is a "legal quant"? According to Jamie Tso, who coined the term, it describes a new breed of elite legal practitioners operating at the frontier of tech who will be the rainmakers of the AI era.  Jamie, who is a practicing lawyer, is not a software engineer. But he does identify as a "legal quant". It's a term he coined to describe a small but growing group of lawyers who use the latest in AI to build small and usable -- and sometimes disposable -- solutions to everyday problems they encounter in their practice.  But this isn't a hobby. Jamie believes legal quants will transform what it means to be an elite practitioner by leveraging AI to design their own weapons for achieving the best outcome for clients. So he's created a community of like-minded practitioners to meet, exchange ideas, problem solve, and ... most importantly... build things.  The driver for this is curiosity and growth. But it's also market realities. AI sets a new baseline. Lawyers who generate work product that is no better than AI-generated output will lag behind. Lawyers who use AI to make better, quicker decisions for their clients will race ahead of those who do not. Organizations who build out the internal capacity and structures needed to translate lawyer ideas and needs into tailored tech solutions will take business from those who do not. Legal quants and other lawyers who are AI-fluent will be the fulcrums for this transformation, and they'll gain professionally (and be rewarded financially) for it. It's a fascinating vision of the future of AI in the practice and business of law. I had a great time talking to Jamie about this moment, and his movement, in AI. Lawyers, students, and professionals alike can learn a lot from how he views the intersection of technology and knowledge work, and what he thinks it will take to reach the top echelons of the legal industry in the AI era.    Jamie Tso | LinkedIn LegalQuants

    44 min

About

One lawyer’s journey to digitally transform his legal practice.  Version Up is a podcast about deploying AI and technology in legal practice. Host Kaj Rozga — a lawyer leading innovation inside a legal team at a Global 500 — cuts through the noise to talk with the practitioners, founders, and operators actually doing the work of rebuilding the practice and business of law for the AI era. Each episode is a practical conversation about what’s working, what isn’t, and what’s worth paying attention to. No hype. No sponsored takes. Just an honest dialogue about building and deploying legal technology at law firms and corporate legal departments. For lawyers, innovation leaders, legal ops professionals, founders and investors who want the TL;DR on the state of play in legal tech. | Hosted by Kaj Rozga | Music by Brett Ryback | views my own |

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