Cohort 3 of the GC Academy returned to Mishcon offices for an immersive session on AI and legal technology. Run by Mishcon de Reya and Flex Legal, The GC Academy is a hands-on development programme designed to provide GCs and senior in-house lawyers with essential tools, practical skills, and connections to lead a legal department and advance your leadership abilities.
Developments in AI and legal technology are moving at an unprecedented pace, reshaping how legal work is delivered, how teams are structured, and how in-house functions operate. This session was deliberately designed to give GCs the grounding they need to cut through the noise and make informed decisions about technology adoption within their teams.
A key highlight of the day was a session with Alex Herrity of Adidas and Tom Rice from Perk - two Legal Ops leaders who shared first-hand insights on building and embedding technology within in-house legal functions, offering participants practical perspectives on what works, what doesn't, and how to bring teams along on the journey. Alex and Tom also took the opportunity to interview Nick West as part of their Law What Next podcast series, which can be found on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Participants then took part in a hands-on AI Escape Room exercise, where they were split into three groups and tasked with using AI to build solutions and workflows to tackle the types of problems commonly faced by in-house legal teams — from contract review bottlenecks to board reporting. Guided by Mishcon lawyers and legal engineers, the exercise gave participants a tangible sense of what is possible and, crucially, how to get started.
Since launching in 2025, the programme has now been delivered to 75 in-house leaders across three cohorts. The 4th cohort is due to start in September with plans to bring the programme to Dubai later in the year.
Alex Herrity, Director of Legal Solutions at Adidas commented: “Sharing our experience of building, implementing and evaluating technology in-house, and hearing the group's own challenges and ambitions in return, was exactly what we hoped for. Credit to Mary, Dan and Lewis for building a programme that brings GCs right up to date on an area that can be difficult to keep pace with from the inside and gives participants actionable takeaways for when they return to their team."
Dan Sinclair, Partner at Mishcon de Reya, added: “Mishcon has spent years innovating with legal technology — not theorising about it, but actually building, testing and learning from it. The GC Academy is our opportunity to pass that lived experience on. We are not here to tell participants what AI means for the legal industry in the abstract; we are here to help them work out what it means for their team, their function and their strategy, and to give them the tools to act on it."
Mary Bonsor, GC Relationships Director at Mishcon and former Founder of Flex Legal, said: “Running Flex Legal gave me a front-row seat to the challenges in-house lawyers face every day — and one of the most consistent themes was the gap between the pace of technological change and the confidence of legal teams to engage with it. General Counsel are being asked to make high-stakes decisions about AI and legal tech without always having the right knowledge or skills to do so. This programme changes that."
Sign up here to get more info on the programme and secure one of the 10 remaining places in our September cohort. The GC Academy team is also planning a Vibe Code hackathon and running an ongoing series of AI webinars for in-house legal teams.
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