Customer Stories
Inside Newsweek’s Legal AI Playbook: From Zero to Fully Embedded
Legal AI. Playbook.
The legal tech vendor hall is chaos.
Every booth promises “AI-powered.” Every demo looks polished. Most tools, once you scratch the surface, don’t hold up in the real world of a lean legal team.
For Zahreen Ghaznavi, General Counsel at Newsweek, this wasn’t just noise. It was risk.
She leads a small, fast-moving legal team at a global media company. The wrong tool wouldn’t just waste budget. It would slow the team down, erode trust, and create more work instead of less.
So she took a different approach.
In a candid interview, Zahreen shares how she went from having almost no legal tech stack to fully embedding Ruli AI into her team’s daily workflow. Not through hype. Through discipline.
She defined the problems first.
She tested aggressively.
She refused to buy based on promises.
What followed is a blueprint for how in-house legal teams should actually adopt AI.
Watch the full interview below, then read the key takeaways from her journey.
3 Tips for GCs Walking Into the Vendor Hall
Zahreen closed with practical advice for any General Counsel navigating the legal AI market:
1. Start with clarity, not curiosity
Know exactly what problems you need to solve before evaluating tools. Without clear goals, every demo looks impressive and none of it sticks.
2. Trust the output. Verify the source.
Hallucinations are real. But they’re manageable when you define narrow use cases and build verification into your workflow. Confidence comes from repetition, not promises.
3. No sandbox, no deal
Never commit based on a demo. Insist on two to three weeks of real testing with your team and your data. If a vendor won’t allow it, that tells you everything.
The Bigger Lesson
Newsweek didn’t adopt AI because it was trending.
They adopted it because it solved real workflow problems.
They tested rigorously.
They chose a tool that fits how lawyers think.
They embedded it where work actually happens.
The result is not just efficiency.
It’s a legal team that moves faster, operates with more confidence, and shows up as a true partner to the business instead of a bottleneck.
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