Customer Stories
How TaskUs’s legal team got an 85% head start in one afternoon
Legal research, outside counsel strategy, global expansion, and a budget that doesn’t grow
When a client asks TaskUs to do something they have never done before, the request lands on Claudia Walsh’s legal team almost every week, in a shape like this one: staff a robotics project in Japan with remote assistance and people on the ground, while running work that may be highly regulated from a different geography.
For most of her time at TaskUs, the next steps were automatic: find a local law firm, wait weeks for the engagement to come together, and then pay for a jurisdictional survey that was slow and expensive.
TaskUs is a business process outsourcing company, but Claudia is quick to say the label undersells it. Its clients are fast-moving technology companies, and the company wins by reacting to their needs with speed and flexibility. For the legal team, that sets an unusual standard. A request that sounds alarming still has to turn into a plan, because declining them is not how TaskUs operates.
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“The answer is never going to be no for us. It’s always going to be, how? How are we going to get there?”
Claudia Walsh, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, TaskUs
For a team of ten, that standard used to depend on outside counsel. Today the first pass happens in-house, in an afternoon, with Ruli In-house Legal AI.
A flat budget and ten tools that weren’t built for AI
Claudia joined TaskUs in late 2021. A year later, a market correction hit the technology companies that make up much of TaskUs’s client base, and for the first time in the company’s history, growth slowed and the focus turned to controlling costs. Legal felt that shift directly. Her budget covers people, software, outside counsel, and the company’s insurance portfolio, and finance measures productivity against headcount and spend. It has stayed flat or shrunk every year since.
Her answer has been technology, applied to process first and tooling second. TaskUs adopted most of its current legal stack during her tenure, roughly ten point solutions covering spend management, contract management, privacy compliance, and more. None of them were built around AI, and their vendors were adding AI features on top as fast as they could. Meanwhile, employees across the company were experimenting with AI on their own. TaskUs responded by rolling out an enterprise version of Google Gemini on top of its existing Google Workspace, vetted and closed loop, and training everyone to use it.
Legal research needed something more specific. A general assistant can draft and summarize, but legal advice depends on knowing where an answer came from.
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“You need to make sure that your sources are verified, that you know what sources are being referenced, that AI isn’t making things up and then you’re passing that off as legal advice.”
Claudia Walsh, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, TaskUs
A pilot run on real questions
The opening came at renewal time for a traditional, expensive legal research platform where TaskUs held only a handful of licenses. When the Ruli team pitched its legal research, Claudia had one question: could Ruli replace that platform inside the same budget?
Getting the pilot started took longer than the pilot itself. Because the team planned to test real questions, TaskUs ran a full vendor security audit and confirmed that its data would never be used to train models and algorithms, since the work the legal team brings to a tool like this is sensitive and confidential. Once it began, she put the people who already held licenses on the legacy platform into the pilot. They ran the same queries through Ruli, Gemini, and the legacy platform side by side and reported back on which gave better results.
The team found Ruli’s answers more robust and thoughtful, and they could verify the sources behind them. Ruli also allowed them to narrow a search to a specific set of sources, such as SEC filings, tier-one law firm memos, or regulation alone. She valued the usage metrics as much as the answers. Reports from the legacy platform had shown that many licensed users rarely ran a search at all, and in the pilot she could see exactly who was running queries and follow up with anyone who wasn’t.
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“Until you’re actually deploying a tool and doing real-world scenarios and trying to solve a problem you need an answer to today, you don’t really know how useful it is.”
Claudia Walsh, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, TaskUs
After the pilot, TaskUs shifted the legacy platform’s budget to Ruli, essentially one for one.
Outside counsel moves to the end of the process
The biggest change shows up in how TaskUs works with outside counsel. In the old model, a request to support a new type of work in a new country meant choosing a local firm first, a search that could take weeks, since the team doesn’t have a contact list of firms in every market.
Now the team starts with Ruli. In a couple of hours, they can map the legal issues that matter, identify potential mitigations, and see how other companies approach the same kind of work. Claudia is careful to say the output isn’t final, but it gets the team most of the way there, and outside counsel comes in to confirm the approach and help carry it out.
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“It is getting us 85% of the way there… And then all that spend with outside counsel becomes maybe confirmatory.”
Claudia Walsh, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, TaskUs
The same logic has changed how TaskUs pursues new business. Previously, that meant paying outside counsel $10,000 to $15,000 for an exploratory survey of risks and baseline requirements. Now the team asks Ruli to draft a playbook for launching in new geographies, which can inform the people bidding and support the team pricing the work. Local counsel comes in only once a win looks likely. This has allowed her team to gain huge savings.
A lean team taking on bigger problems
For a ten-person legal department, the return shows up as capacity. TaskUs’s business is growing, with new countries, new clients, and new service lines, and her team is the first to say it feels stretched. Tools like Ruli let it take on more work without matching that growth in headcount. As she frames it, when a task that once took two hours takes 30 minutes, that’s an hour and a half back in the day to take the next item off the queue.
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“Using these technologies has enabled my team to basically take on more work with less people. That’s the truth.”
Claudia Walsh, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, TaskUs
Claudia describes Ruli as an assistant that makes every box on the org chart faster and sharper, with the team still doing the judgment work. Team members cite what Ruli returns in conversations with peers across the company, the way they would any other data point, aware that it can be conservative and doesn’t have the full context of the business.
Ruli also works as a sounding board. Before sending an email, an issue summary, or a memo to the board, lawyers on the team ask Ruli whether they missed anything, whether anything is inconsistent, and whether they’re thinking about the right risks.
That extra capacity opens room for work that used to sit at the bottom of the list, like proactive compliance monitoring, which Claudia sees as a natural next use. It also frees the team up for the curveballs. Several years ago, leadership asked legal to support a new service that involved rescuing stranded autonomous vehicles, a move into physical operations for a company that had always worked remotely. The team had to figure out the legal issues from scratch. That line of work has since grown into a major part of TaskUs’s business, and Claudia notes that TaskUs didn’t have Ruli yet when it began. When the next unfamiliar idea arrives, the team has a faster path from the first question to a workable answer.
The team itself is part of that story. She says TaskUs’s legal department attracts people with an “appetite for challenges.”. A tool that speeds up that learning fits that appetite.
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“It’s making us all much better at our jobs, and it’s making the job more fun.”
Claudia Walsh, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, TaskUs
What comes next
Claudia sees two frontiers. The first is access. The current license doesn’t cover the whole department, and she feels strongly that every member of the team should have it. The second is integration. TaskUs still pays for ten legal tools, and AI sits alongside them rather than inside them, so the open question is how AI plugs into those tools or replaces some of them.
Her team has already measured progress elsewhere. In vendor contracting, automation now keeps legal from touching every agreement. Ruli has moved from a pilot meant to replace one expensive platform into a regular part of how the team thinks and works.
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