Customer Stories
Inside Newsweek’s Legal AI Playbook: From Zero to Fully Embedded
Research, drafting, M&A, regulatory monitoring
When Zahreen Ghaznavi joined Newsweek as General Counsel in 2024, the legal department had almost no technology to its name. What followed was a rigorous, months-long search that would change how the whole team worked.
The legal tech vendor hall is chaos. Every booth promises AI-powered everything. 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, this wasn't an abstract concern. She leads a lean, fast-moving legal team at a global media company. The wrong tool would waste budget, slow the team down, and create more work instead of less. So she took a different approach: define the requirements first, test aggressively, and refuse to buy based on promises alone.
Starting with requirements, not demos
Zahreen came in knowing two things. Her team needed to move fast across a wide range of legal questions. And they needed something built specifically for in-house counsel, not a general productivity tool dressed up in legal language.
"I knew it had to be something that was built for legal teams. Particularly for in-house legal teams. I didn't even know that category existed until I started researching. That was part of the discovery process for me."
Zahreen Ghaznavi, General Counsel, Newsweek
Before looking at a single demo, she mapped what the team actually needed. Easy adoption with no coding or prompt engineering expertise required. Verifiable citations, because trusting an output means being able to trace it back to a source. And genuine AI capability, not a search engine wrapped in modern language.
With that list in hand, she demoed four tools and sandboxed three of them over a few months. Two of those sandboxes ended quickly. One tool had access to the right legal databases but moved slowly. Another kept making mistakes during the demo itself. Her thinking: if it's getting things wrong when they're trying to sell it to you, you can imagine what it does under real pressure.
The moment the team knew
During one of the Ruli demos, a team member asked if she could test something specific: drafting a response to a claim letter. Not a hypothetical. A real document, right there in the session.
The letter came back quickly. But what caught everyone's attention wasn't the speed. It was the tone. The draft sounded like a lawyer. More specifically, it sounded like her lawyer, with the right register for the situation and the right instincts about what to emphasize.
"The first thing she noted was that the tone of the letter matched her own. Other tools we tried were less good at capturing that. They weren't equipped to do legal-specific communications, not just citations, but how lawyers actually talk to business people, to opposing counsel, to outside counsel."
Zahreen Ghaznavi, General Counsel, Newsweek
The prompt engineering tool sealed it. The team isn't made up of AI specialists. They're lawyers. Ruli's ability to take a plain-language request and generate a better prompt automatically meant the team could get strong outputs without needing to learn a new skill. Everyone in the room noticed it.
What the team actually uses it for
Ruli started as a first-draft tool. That alone delivered enormous value for a team managing a high volume of substantive communications. But the use cases expanded quickly once the team got comfortable.
Hours saved per M&A diligence project using DataGrid to extract contract clauses across large document sets.
Minutes to process years of litigation briefing and discovery into a cited summary, with every source traceable.
Ruli’s regulatory alerts surface new developments in real time—often ahead of newsletter alerts from outside counsel.
The M&A work was a turning point. Newsweek had been doing more acquisition activity, and the team didn't have the resources to send due diligence out to outside counsel. They needed to do it in-house. Ruli's DataGrid feature let them feed in a batch of contracts, specify the clause type they were looking for, and get a structured chart back in a fraction of the time it would have taken manually.
For Zahreen, the litigation summary tool solved a problem she had walked into on day one. There were cases that had been running for years before she arrived, with thousands of documents in the record. She could feed the briefings and discovery materials into Ruli and get a cited summary in minutes, with every source linked so she could verify anything that needed checking.
The regulatory monitoring function matters especially for the team's privacy law work. Privacy is moving fast, and Newsweek is a global brand. Having a tool that surfaces new developments in real time, already processed and consolidated, means the team hears about changes before the law firm alerts arrive. The alerts don't replace legal analysis, but they give the team a head start on understanding the scope of what's happening.
The global coverage mattered too. Zahreen is a New York-based attorney, but her team operates across jurisdictions. Ruli's access to EU and UK legal sources meant the London-based team members could use the tool just as effectively as the US team. That kind of reach wasn't a given across the tools she evaluated.
How the business felt it
The legal team didn't broadcast that they were using AI. They didn't need to. The business felt the difference through the quality and speed of the team's responses.
"The number one feedback I get about my team is how responsive they are, how quick they are to respond. I do think Ruli enables that. We get random questions. That's the nature of being an in-house lawyer. You're dealing with things you didn't think you'd have to deal with. Having a tool that helps you be that generalist is really important."
Zahreen Ghaznavi, General Counsel, Newsweek
One of the clearest financial benefits has been in how the team scopes outside counsel work. Before, a complex question in an unfamiliar area might require a full engagement with a law firm. Now, Zahreen can use Ruli to understand the landscape of the problem first, narrow the issue, and go to outside counsel with a focused question rather than an open-ended one. A 40-page memo becomes a tight, targeted brief. That saves time and money on both sides.
The team has also shifted how it shows up inside the business. Less time on research and document processing has meant more time on actual strategic partnership work. Zahreen describes it as finally being able to do the high-level judgment work that in-house counsel is supposed to be doing, instead of spending all their hours on the operational layer underneath it.
What happens if Ruli goes away
Zahreen's answer to this question is probably the clearest measure of how embedded the tool has become.
"[If I could not use Ruli tomorrow] You're going to see us take a lot longer. You're going to see us consulting outside counsel more. It's not possible for a lawyer to be an expert in everything in every jurisdiction, and Newsweek is a global brand. If Ruli went away, I wouldn't feel comfortable making a call about an employment rule in California, for example, without consulting someone. That comfortableness we have with the tool would disappear."
Zahreen Ghaznavi, General Counsel, Newsweek
Three things Zahreen would tell any GC walking into the vendor hall
01
Start with your goals, not the demos
Know exactly what problems you need to solve before you look at a single tool. Without clear goals, every demo looks impressive and none of them stick. If you go in without a framework, you'll end up with a great tool that happens to be the wrong one for your team.
02
Bring questions you already know the answers to
Walk into every demo with two or three scenarios where you already know the right answer. If the tool gets them wrong, or hedges in ways that don't hold up, you have what you need. If it gets them right and shows its sources, you're building the foundation for real trust. That standard held up across every tool Zahreen evaluated, and it's how Ruli earned its place on the shortlist.
03
No sandbox, no deal
Never commit based on a demo. Ask for two to three weeks of real testing with your team and your actual data. If a vendor won't allow it, that tells you everything. And when you get the sandbox, sit down with the team afterward. Ask what worked, what didn't. They'll use a tool they helped choose.
Ruli earned its place at Newsweek through months of rigorous evaluation, chosen by the team that uses it every day and embedded in the actual workflows where the pressure is real.
The result is a legal function that moves at the pace of a global media business, shows up as a strategic partner to the business, and earns its reputation through the consistency and speed of its advice.
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