The development of artificial intelligence is in its preliminary stages, but general counsel and senior managing counsel at more than a dozen top Texas companies say it is already impacting their legal departments and how they work with outside counsel.
The Texas Lawbook asked 18 corporate in-house counsel at businesses ranging from LyondellBasell, Energy Transfer and ExxonMobil to PepsiCo, Houston Methodist and Fertitta Entertainment for their experiences so far with AI.
These are their responses.
Texas Lawbook: How is AI impacting your internal team’s work?
Phillips 66 GC Vanessa Sutherland: AI is increasing the capacity, speed and quality of our internal legal work by helping the team handle more work in-house, improve turnaround times and support better-informed decisions. Internally, we are using AI to streamline document drafting, regulatory analysis, legal research and contract review, freeing our legal professionals to focus more of their time on higher-value strategic work or client engagement. AI also acts as a thought-partner on complex issues.
Lawbook: How is AI impacting your relationship with outside counsel?
Sutherland: Legal operations is a relationship-capital, interactive practice. AI has caused more engagement with firms to understand how these early days of generative AI are affecting the matters we have. Both sides are humble enough to know that there is more to learn — which is building stronger partnerships, rather than straining them. Over time, AI will affect the questions general counsel ask about associates’ training and development as well as about law firm economics.
Lawbook: How is AI impacting your work?
Deep Blue Deputy General Counsel Ali Denson: As in-house counsel with a small legal department, on any given day, each of us is responsible for projects that may not be our historical area of practice, and AI legal research tools have been instrumental in supplementing knowledge in these areas. In particular, AI legal research tools have been useful as a first pass for unfamiliar or less frequently encountered areas of law. They help accelerate issue-spotting, provide a structured overview of relevant concepts and point us toward key considerations or authorities that we can then validate and build upon through traditional research and professional judgment. Overall though, AI has not changed the fundamental nature of our work, but it has meaningfully enhanced our efficiency and flexibility.
Lawbook: How is AI impacting your work and relationship with outside counsel?
Denson: AI tools have increased our ability to get to a baseline understanding of unfamiliar issues much more quickly. In a small legal department where we often operate outside our core areas of expertise, it means we can do more informed initial issue-spotting and framing before we decide whether to escalate something externally. As a result, when we do engage outside counsel, we’re often coming in with a clearer sense of the facts, the business context and the specific questions we want answered. AI has also influenced how we think about scoping and value. Because we can now handle more of the initial synthesis internally, we tend to be more intentional about when we bring in outside counsel and what we ask them to focus on.
Lawbook: How is AI impacting your work?
Siemens Energy GC Denise Hansen: Getting the SEI North American legal team to truly “buy in” to the careful and approved use cases for AI in our daily work and creating new use cases. We recently held a global AI Gamechanger competition for our legal and compliance colleagues to propose use cases, agents or examples of daily uses for AI to simplify and speed up our work processes. Of the eight finalists, seven were from the North America team, and all three medal winners were all from our NA team! I was very proud of all the submissions. Lawyers can be innovative, too!
We see the impact in efficiency, speed in doing simple tasks, summarizing emails or documents, even searching for emails or documents to get what we need faster. We use it for research, applying internal policies to specific situations, summarizing processes and advice for specific questions presented by business partners. We use it in contracting strategy and negotiations, summarizing changes, comparing contractual positions across customers, making timelines and also for preparing presentations. My team is far more adept at using AI than I am, but I am learning! I am a nightmare when it comes to preparing PowerPoint slides, formatting, adding in pictures or graphs, etc. Now, I can just ask AI to do it for me once I load in the data I want to use, and I look like a pro! I would describe AI as the first-year associate I used to work with at the law firm. I am still the partner that must finalize it and apply my experience and voice as needed. But it is a powerful tool to execute our daily tasks in a much more efficient manner. I need to use even more than I already do, and our team has ongoing workshops to brainstorm new use cases and exchange ideas so we can knowledge-share and get better at using it!
Lawbook: How is AI impacting your work and relationship with outside counsel?
Hansen: This is something that is definitely in the works. We are starting to interview our external counsel about their use of AI in relation to when they are and are not allowed to use it on our cases and how it will impact billing practices and work product. I think this is a fascinating developing arena that GCs and their external counsel are going to be navigating over the next years, and I really cannot wait to see where it goes. We are on the edge of a new frontier here. Anyone who is not having that conversation is going to be left behind. Questions such as using AI ethically, using it safely in order to protect our proprietary and confidential data and the billing surrounding the use of AI are topics both firms and their clients are going to have to partner on as we move forward to ensure there is alignment and a true partnership there.
Lawbook: How is AI impacting your work?
ExxonMobil Managing Counsel David Kern: Using AI to enhance our work as lawyers is table stakes and will continue to evolve. Thinking now how AI will impact our areas of the law in the future is where I think lawyers can show their value beyond AI. For example, the ability to quickly access massive amounts of data through public documents has the chance to further level the playing field for all investors across multiple categories of assets in the same way that index investing did a generation ago.
This is really exciting to me. What new services will evolve out of this? How will the public markets respond? How does ExxonMobil evolve our disclosures in the future to lean into this for our investors? I think it is going to be interesting!
Lawbook: How is AI impacting your work and relationship with outside counsel?
Kern: I’m worried that the model where associates get trained breaks down with AI. First, are they doing work that will give them the skills they need to think creatively in the future with me or is AI “deskilling” them? Second, is AI becoming a substitute for associate work?
I think it will continue to impact where we see the value of outside counsel and what we are willing to pay for. The good news is that things like joining committee or doing the sweat equity within the legal community is not something AI can do for you. I think the leading partners in the next generation are going to be those who do these things seriously now.
Lawbook: How has AI impacted the work of your legal department?
PepsiCo Foods GC Adrienne Mosley: AI has had a profound impact on the way our legal department operates at PepsiCo. As the company advances its strategic transformation and regulatory complexity intensifies, increasing demands on our team mean we must leverage every tool in our toolkit to meet these challenges. Like so many in the Texas legal community, we know expectations are at an all-time high for in-house legal departments, and we would be remiss if we did not embrace technologies that enable us deliver to more efficiently and effectively. At PepsiCo, we have integrated AI to drive productivity and continue to explore new ways to expand its use. With obvious considerations for confidentiality, AI tools are now embedded in our daily operations, helping us with everything from automating routine systems, developing initial drafts, reviewing outside counsel spend, and capturing and summarizing key points and action items from meetings. AI allows us to focus on the strategic, multifaceted and nuanced legal work that defines our value to the business. AI has become an essential partner — helping us navigate the changing landscapes of PepsiCo’s strategic transformation and the increasingly complex regulatory frameworks we operate within — ensuring that we continue to deliver the high-quality, business-oriented legal support.
Lawbook: What were the biggest challenges in developing and implementing Castleton’s AI tools?
Castelton Commodities Counsel Helen Xiang: The bulk of the work in developing policies and procedures around AI usage generally at CCI was done by our amazing compliance, generative AI and cybersecurity and IT infrastructure teams. I got involved when our principal investments team raised the question of using our AI tools to evaluate confidential information that they’ve received under NDAs. The biggest challenge was learning and wrapping my mind around everything that happens when you use an AI tool behind the scenes, to learn about how different programs for storage, retrieval and encryption all work together and how we square that with our confidentiality obligations. I then worked with our compliance team to draft the policy and held a series of meetings with our investment professionals to help them understand the restrictions and also incorporate their feedback.
Lawbook: How is AI impacting your work?
Xiang: It’s become one of my responsibilities to stay on top of developments and changes so I can update the rest of the legal team, our general counsel and our head of compliance. We’re thinking about how we can implement it in our work to be more efficient. So far, the chatbots are useful as another avenue to bounce ideas off of. Sometimes, I use it to generate form communications or responses to counterparty requests, and then I change language and rewrite portions to tailor it for what I need. Sometimes, it can give a useful framework to start from, but you still need the lawyer’s mind and the human touch to make the final work product shine.
Lawbook: How is AI impacting your relationship with outside counsel?
Xiang: Not too much at this stage. We’re certainly asked by outside counsel if they can use AI tools to review agreements for diligence, but we would still expect someone to review the AI-generated output to make sure it matches up with the underlying agreements and that our concerns are being addressed.
Lawbook: How is AI impacting your work?
Plains All American GC Richard McGee: It is “early days,” as we are rapidly learning new ways to be more efficient and productive through the use of AI. I firmly believe we need to lean into the use of AI, or we will fall behind our competitors and suboptimize our performance.
Lawbook: How is AI impacting your work and relationship with outside counsel?
McGee: I don’t think it has had a material impact at this point, but as I indicated above, our assimilation and use of AI is still in the early days. There are definitely some “use cases” where AI will perform some tasks that we would otherwise have outside counsel perform or provide assistance, but my hope is that the use of AI by both outside counsel and the company will lead to greater efficiency and productivity for both the company and our counsel.
Lawbook: How is AI impacting your work?
ConocoPhillips Senior Counsel Scott Kelly: ConocoPhillips is a big proponent of AI. I use AI every day at work for big and small tasks. My work has become more streamlined as a result.
Lawbook: How is AI impacting your work and relationship with outside counsel?
Kelly: At this point, I believe it’s become an expectation that outside counsel find ways to utilize AI to improve work quality and do it more efficiently. I appreciate that I can now get AI generated summaries of depositions and other case materials from outside counsel and largely eliminate the need for outside counsel to spend time on those sorts of tasks. Of course, we still do expect that outside counsel review AI-generated materials for accuracy.
Outside counsel used AI during our trials to help with our preparation and to refine our arguments. One fun example: After close of evidence, outside counsel had everything loaded into AI and essentially asked how our jury would decide the case. It correctly predicted we would win!
Lawbook: How is AI impacting your work?
LyondellBasell GC Jeff Kaplan: Each member of our department has at least one AI goal for 2026, whether it is as sophisticated as creating an agent to help with tasks or just spending time each week getting familiar with the technology. Our IP team has led the way with several sophisticated use cases, and they are helping our other practice areas find their use cases. For many people, it is a productivity tool at the outset, so I don’t see AI replacing lawyers any time soon. But soon lawyers who use AI will replace those who don’t.
Lawbook: How is AI impacting your work and relationship with outside counsel?
Kaplan: It has not yet.
Lawbook: How is AI impacting your work?
ExxonMobil Senior Counsel Cisselon Nichols Hurd: AI is definitely impacting my work — it was a bit shocking at first, but we have had lots of training, and I find it useful in terms of summarizing lengthy documents. As an environmental litigator, I must review lots of documents that tend to be technical, so I definitely do not rely 100 percent on AI due to the potential “hallucinations”.
Lawbook: How is AI impacting your work and relationship with outside counsel?
Hurd: Our law firms are required to state how they will use AI when they respond to [requests for proposals]. In my experience it seems to be having a positive impact.
Lawbook: How is AI impacting your work?
Enerflex Senior Counsel Melanie Benefield: AI is already shaping the way I work and the way legal teams can support the business more effectively. I believe there is real truth in the idea that AI will not take your job, but someone who knows how to use it well may. In 2025, I served on an AI committee tasked with evaluating legal AI systems that could enhance our operations. Through that work, I helped modernize legal and commercial processes by assessing technology platforms and helping select a solution aligned with the company’s efficiency and growth objectives. The initiative was focused on streamlining workflows, improving collaboration between legal and supply chain, and building a stronger foundation for scale. It has the potential to make routine work more efficient, allowing lawyers to focus more time on judgment, strategy and risk management. I also recognize that responsible use of AI requires continual learning, discipline and sound judgment, and I am committed to developing that proficiency in a thoughtful and responsible way.
Lawbook: How is AI impacting your work and relationship with outside counsel?
Benefield: As in-house teams become more sophisticated in using AI, there is increasing expectation that outside counsel will use AI thoughtfully and responsibly to improve efficiency, responsiveness and value. At the same time, it makes judgment, experience and trusted advice even more important. I also value outside counsel partners who continue to offer CLEs and practical discussions about what they are learning about AI and how they are applying it.
Lawbook: How is AI impacting your work?
Fertitta Entertainment GC Steven Scheinthal: It makes things a lot easier and faster. I have used it to write memos, letters and do document reviews. It is a huge time-saver.
Lawbook: How is AI impacting your work and relationship with outside counsel?
The expectation is that outside counsel should be more efficient and save time on projects, which should save us money — but also should make us smarter about our matters, too.
Lawbook: How is AI impacting your work?
Houston Methodist Hospital Legal Counsel Marissa Marquez: Helping me summarize complex legal concepts into lay person terms.
Helping me formulate perhaps like an email where I am trying to share thoughts or questions that are asked in a more concise and basic manager.
Lawbook: How is AI impacting your work and relationship with outside counsel?
Marquez: I think AI is helping outside counsel like it is helping me, by searching laws that may be easier explained if AI generates a short summary.
Lawbook: How is AI impacting your work?
LyondellBasell Lead Counsel Dave Louie: I’m trying to figure out how to use it to augment my work without ceding my critical thinking skills. I’ve been toying with different use cases — sometimes using it to summarize contracts or proofread documents. Other times, I’ve used it to help teach me basics on unfamiliar subjects and asked for citations to sources so that I can further research the issue.
Lawbook: How is AI impacting your work?
Energy Transfer Assistant GC Ali Henderson: I am still getting my arms around AI and all the offerings in the legal field. One tool that I have found useful so far is AI-generated deposition summaries and insights. These have helped me in recent months in terms of comparing my notes and ensuring that I capture the key takeaways in order to effectively communicate them.
Lawbook: How is AI impacting your work?
Energy and Minerals GC Laura Tyson: I am still in the beginning stages of using AI for work. I use it a lot for personal travel recommendations and general inquiries. For work, I often use it to double check conclusions.
Lawbook: How is AI impacting your work?
Shell USA Senior Counsel Sara Keith: AI has streamlined certain administrative and related tasks, creating efficiencies. It is also helpful for generating quick summaries or guidance based on prior work. However, it can produce inaccuracies, so prompts must be precise and outputs carefully verified.
Lawbook: How is AI impacting your work and relationship with outside counsel?
Keith: AI is shaping expectations around pricing and efficiency. Accordingly, we seek proposals in which firms use AI, where appropriate, to streamline workloads.