Resources

The Top 5 Lexion Alternatives for In-House Legal Teams in 2026

Comparing Lexion alternatives in 2026? See how Sandstone, Ironclad, Juro, Leah, and Agiloft stack up for in-house legal teams, and how to choose.

Virginia Johnson: Betting on Yourself

She spent two decades climbing toward the titles, the raises, the next rung. Then she stepped off the ladder entirely, just to find out what she actually wanted. Jessica sits down with Virginia Johnson, Partner at Outside General Counsel (OGC), to talk about the relationships that built her career, the sabbatical that redefined it, and what she looks for now in a role, a founder, and herself.

Why an Effective Legal Ticketing System Helps In-House Teams

Discover how a legal ticketing system centralizes intake, automates routing, and gives in-house teams the visibility to work faster and smarter.

Why Legal Knowledge Management Matters for In-House Teams

See how AI-native legal knowledge management helps in-house teams capture precedent, cut duplicate work, and retain institutional knowledge.

Why Legal Teams Need a Context Engine, Not Another Chatbot

Chatbots don't know your playbooks or deal history. Learn how a context engine gives in-house legal AI the institutional knowledge it needs to be useful.

Will AI Replace Junior Lawyers on In-House Teams?

AI is taking over the repetitive work that used to fill a junior lawyer's week. Here's what that means for early-career counsel on in-house teams, and the skills that matter now.

Alexandra Sepulveda: Curiosity is a Superpower

What do duct-taped ramen floaties have to do with in-house counsel? Everything, according to Alexandra Sepulveda, who has learned that curiosity, receipts, and the willingness to start over are the real survival skills of a legal career. Jessica sits down with Alexandra Sepulveda of Trust & Will for a wide-ranging conversation about building a legal career across startups, enterprise, and everything in between. They cover mentorship, management lessons, outside counsel dynamics, and where AI fits into the future of legal work.

AI Hallucination Guardrails: When AI Is Right, But Risky

AI hallucination guardrails catch fabricated output, but accurate AI without business context can still create risk. Here's what in-house legal teams need to trust AI.

Alternative Legal Fee Arrangements: What GCs Get Wrong

GCs who want fee arrangements that hold need precise scope, historical matter data, and the confidence to lead the negotiation. Here are the five most common AFA mistakes and how to fix each one.

The Impact of AI on Legal Billing: How the Billable Hour Changes

AI is removing hours from legal work faster than firms are repricing it. How in-house teams can turn that gap into leverage on rates, AFAs, and outside counsel spend.

How to Prevent Legal Burnout Before It Costs Your Team

Burnout is quietly reshaping in-house legal teams. Learn to spot the warning signs and use operational tools — intake, triage, and workload visibility — to stop attrition before it starts.

Dina Segal: Build, Iterate, Transform

Every general counsel remembers the job they didn't want. For Dina Segal, that job became the foundation for every one that followed, and the reason she now tells rising leaders to stop waiting until they feel ready. Jessica sits down with Dina Segal, Chief Legal Officer of Gusto to talk about her path from early litigation and tax work to becoming CLO, and what she has learned about building fearlessness, hiring for AI fluency, and running legal teams through a period of rapid change.

5 Questions to Ask AI Legal Software Vendors Before You Buy

Capture in-house legal teams in active vendor evaluation, using the evaluation framework to steer buying criteria toward Sandstone's strengths.

Lawyer-backed VC fund launches to invest in legal tech

Sandstone receives first investment from GCVC

Trista Engel and Jessica Markowitz: Think Like an Executive

Two non-lawyers now run one of the legal industry's most established staffing firms, and their outsider perspective may be exactly what makes them so valuable to the GCs they serve. Jessica sits down with Trista Engel, CEO, and Jessica Markowitz, President and Chief Operating Officer of Paragon Legal. Together they trace how two business partners without legal backgrounds built Paragon into a national flexible legal talent company, and what that outsider vantage point taught them about what GCs actually need to succeed.

Building a Legal Intake Process Executives Will Actually Follow

How to design a legal intake process that in-house teams will actually use, from capturing requests across channels to AI-powered triage and routing with Sandstone.

Why Legal Ops Change Management Keeps Failing Your Team

Help legal ops leaders understand why change management initiatives fail and how to get stakeholder buy-in, positioning Sandstone as the platform that removes adoption friction.

How Poor Legal Ops Performance Holds Your Legal Team Back

The warning signs of underperforming legal ops are hiding in plain sight. Here's how Sandstone's unified intake, AI-powered triage, and analytics close the gap.

Deborah Solmor on Preparing the Next Generation of GCs

In this episode, Jessica sits down with Deborah Solmor, General Counsel of Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and Founder of Ready Set GC. They cover Deborah's path from Skadden to in-house leadership, the lessons that shaped Ready Set GC, and how she continues to build community for women in law.

ChatGPT for Contract Review: 5 Risks For Legal Teams

Five risks in-house legal teams should understand before making ChatGPT a standard part of their contract review process.

How Legal Operations Efficiency Gaps Are Costing Your Team

Common legal operations efficiency gaps — scattered intake, manual triage, siloed data — drive hidden costs and slow the business. Sandstone's unified AI platform closes them.

Build vs. Buy Legal AI: What In-House Teams Should Know (2026 Guide)

Help in-house legal teams weigh build vs. buy AI, then position Sandstone as the faster, lower-risk option — integration, institutional knowledge, and workflow orchestration out of the box.

AI Agents for Legal: What They Do for In-House Legal Teams in 2026

A guide to AI agents for in-house legal: how they work, where they add value, and how to evaluate them with Sandstone as the playbook-driven solution for agentic AI.

How to Centralize Legal Requests And Stop Losing Them

How in-house legal teams can centralize scattered requests into a unified intake system with structured routing — eliminating lost requests and manual triage with Sandstone's AI-powered platform.

13 legal startups to watch in 2026, according to investors

13 legal startups to watch in 2026

Getting SOC 2 Done: Lessons from Sandstone's First Audit

What it actually takes to complete SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2 as an early-stage AI company, from choosing a compliance platform to surviving the audit and earning enterprise trust.

10 KPIs Every In-House Legal Team Should Be Tracking

Ten essential legal department KPIs for in-house teams — from contract cycle time to risk metrics — and how to start tracking them consistently.

How To Build An Efficient Legal Capacity Planning Strategy

Help in-house legal teams build a legal capacity planning strategy that prevents burnout, justifies headcount, and positions Sandstone as the solution for workload visibility and automation

Sandstone Launches Evolving with Jessica Nguyen Podcast

Sandstone launches Evolving with Jessica Nguyen, a podcast featuring candid conversations with GCs and legal ops leaders redefining how in-house teams operate

Catherine Romero: Always Bet on Curiosity

In this episode, Jessica sits down with Catherine Romero, a former manager, mentor, and dear friend who quietly left an engineering career at Boeing, secretly enrolled in law school, helped take Amazon public at Perkins Coie, and is now back in an engineering role at Microsoft using AI to help solve some of the world's biggest problems.

Mary O'Carroll on Bridging Law and Technology

In this episode, Jessica sits down with Mary O'Carroll, CEO of LegalEng Consulting Group, for a wide-ranging conversation on where legal ops came from, where legal tech is going, and what it is going to take to get there.

Eric Dodson Greenberg on Relationships and the Future of Law

Evolving with Jessica Nguyen is officially here. Jessica sits down with Eric Dodson Greenberg, EVP, General Counsel & Corporate Secretary of Cox Media Group, for a conversation that covers career growth, leadership culture, and where AI is taking the legal profession.

Point Solutions vs. a Holistic Platform for Legal Ops

Why point solutions create hidden costs for in-house legal teams — and how Sandstone's vertical AI platform consolidates intake, knowledge orchestration, and legal operations.

The AI Governance Gap: Why In-House Counsel Needs an AI Playbook

Most organizations are running AI, but they haven't fully governed it. A practical framework for in-house counsel to close the gap before it becomes a liability.

How to Modernize Your Legal Tech Stack: 5 Best Tools in 2026

Help legal teams understand the essential components of a modern legal tech stack and position Sandstone as the AI-native solution that unifies tools, context, and workflows without disruption.

Evolving with Jessica Nguyen Trailer

Evolving with Jessica Nguyen is the podcast for in-house legal professionals who are thinking bigger. Every episode, Jessica sits down with legal and business leaders who are future-proofing their teams to go deep on how they hire, how they lead, how they're using AI, and what they're still figuring out.

8 KPIs for Legal Departments That GCs Need To Measure

Educate general counsels on the eight most impactful legal department KPIs and show how Sandstone enables teams to track them without manual reporting.

How Do Corporate Legal Departments Achieve AI Adoption?

A guide for general counsel and legal ops leaders on how AI adoption transforms in-house legal departments, with Sandstone as the purpose-built platform

In-House Legal Workflow Platform Sandstone Raises $30M in Series A Funding

Sandstone Raises $30M to Bring AI to In-House Legal Teams

Sandstone Raises $30M Series A Led by Lightspeed to Build the Legal Department of the Future

Investment will accelerate scaling, community building, and expand access to Sandstone's Legal Relationship Management platform for in-house legal teams

Sandstone Raises $30M to Build the Legal Department of the Future

Every company's legal knowledge starts as sand...

Sandstone Theory- What It Means to Be Set in Sandstone

The legal departments we admire most have that quality. They are not rigid — they adapt constantly to new regulations, new business models, new commercial realities.

Sandstone Theory #3

In-House Legal Needs a View Into Relationships, Not Just Contracts

How AI Transforms the Legal Operations Maturity Model

Discover where your legal department sits on the legal operations maturity curve — and how Sandstone helps in-house teams move faster and work smarter with AI

Horizontal vs. Vertical Legal AI: Which One Holds You Back?

Vertical AI vs. horizontal AI for legal teams. Why Sandstone's purpose-built approach delivers the domain expertise and institutional knowledge in-house legal departments need to operate strategically

How AI Can Improve Legal Department Efficiency in 2026

How GCs and legal ops leaders can improve legal department efficiency with AI in 2026 — and how Sandstone makes it straightforward to execute.

Legal Document Automation: 5 Best Tools For Legal Teams

A guide for in-house legal teams: what legal document automation is, how it works, and which tools best fit your needs — including Sandstone's AI-native, unified approach

Top 8 Legal Analytics Solutions in 2026

Evaluate the top legal analytics software of 2026. Explore core use cases, key features, and why Sandstone leads for in-house legal operations and workflow automation.

Sandstone Theory #2 - Legal Should See Less Work

Not every request requires legal review — yet legal still spends significant time determining whether review is needed in the first place.

Legal Process Automation: Beyond Just Automating Tasks

Help in-house legal teams understand what legal process automation is and how to apply it effectively, positioning Sandstone as the platform that brings it all together.

Enterprise Legal AI Platforms: How to Choose the Right One

Help in-house legal teams understand enterprise legal AI platforms, what features to evaluate, and how to choose a solution, positioning Sandstone as the platform built for modern legal departments.

Legal Operations Automation: A Guide for In-House Teams

Help in-house legal teams through the case for automating legal operations with Sandstone presented as the preferred platform for teams ready to make the next step.

5 Key Challenges for In-House Legal Teams & How AI Can Help

Show how AI-native tooling solves in-house legal teams' top 5 challenges without disrupting workflows, positioning AI as a human-in-the-loop solution, not an overhaul.

The Sandstone Theory: Principle #1

Legal departments should operate with an omnichannel presence.

5 Best Software Tools for Legal Matter Management for In-House Teams

The best legal matter management software for in-house teams — compared. Find the right tool to centralize intake, automate routing, and unlock institutional knowledge

How to Solve CLM Challenges with a Legal-AI Software

Educate legal ops & GCs on common CLM challenges and position Sandstone as the modern AI solution that resolves pain points without a costly overhaul.

The Sandstone Theory: Legal Is the Glue. So, Why Does It Keep Breaking?

Ask any General Counsel what their department does: we touch everything. Legal sits at the intersection of every significant decision the company makes. The department isn't a function. It's the glue.

What is a Legal Playbook and Why it's Crucial For In-House Teams

For legal ops and in-house counsel managing playbooks manually or without a formal system, discover how AI-powered playbooks make institutional knowledge scalable and self-improving.

Why Sandstone Is Built for Privilege Protection

Trust isn't a feature at Sandstone — it's a design decision. Here's how Sandstone's access architecture and ZDR commitments keep legal work confidential and protected

How to Use Legal Workflow Automation to Reduce Manual Tasks

Educate in-house legal teams on how workflow automation eliminates repetitive manual tasks, while positioning Sandstone as the AI-native solution to scale legal operations without adding headcount.

Middesk Updates a Tangle of Forms, Slack, and Email with a Single Operating Layer

Middesk is a fast-moving business identity platform with a lean legal function — a single in-house counsel supporting the entire company. With no CLM in place and intake scattered across a Google Form, Slack threads, and inbound email, every request risked falling through the cracks. Contract review was piling up alongside repetitive policy questions, and redlines were being drafted with general-purpose tools like ChatGPT that frequently hallucinated Word output. By adopting Sandstone as its legal operating layer, Middesk is consolidating contract review, intake, and policy Q&A into a single workflow — giving its solo counsel the leverage of a full legal ops stack without the implementation burden of a traditional CLM.

Beyond AI Legal Assistants: Why In-House Legal Teams Need More

Educate in-house legal professionals and legal ops leaders on the limitations of standalone AI legal assistants, and position Sandstone as a differentiated AI-native platform

How to Effectively Manage Legal Requests with Systems & Software

Help in-house legal teams evaluate AI-powered request management software and position Sandstone as the platform to modernize their department.

AI Contract Review Software in 2026: Features and Use Cases

This guide covers everything in-house teams need to know: how it works, what to look for, which tools lead the market, and why the best implementations go far beyond faster redlines.

Best Legal Intake Software for In-House Legal Teams (2026)

Legal intake software captures, routes, and manages incoming legal requests. But the term means something different depending on who's using it.

MasterClass Reimagines Legal Intake and Operations

MasterClass is a consumer technology company whose legal team, led by General Counsel Kevin Yung, is rethinking its entire legal operations infrastructure. With legal requests arriving through a tangle of disconnected systems — multiple NDA channels, parallel approval workflows, untracked Slack threads, and email-based marketing reviews — the team was spending more time managing process than doing legal work. By using Sandstone as a centralized legal operations hub, MasterClass is working to eliminate duplicate data entry, consolidate fragmented intake channels, and extend legal tracking to non-contract work that has never been captured before.

Building the Next-Generation Legal Department

Traditional legal departments are built around lawyers and matters. Next-generation legal departments are built around knowledge and systems.

Legal Intake Automation: How AI Can Help Your Legal Team

Legal Intake Automation: How AI Can Help Your Legal Team

Crexi Uses Sandstone to Find Leverage in Scaling

Crexi is a fast-growing commercial real estate technology platform operating with a lean legal team responsible for supporting high-velocity business activity across the entire organization. With contract requests flowing in through multiple channels simultaneously, the team faced a familiar but critical challenge: too much volume, too little structure, and no single place to manage it all. By implementing Sandstone as its operating layer for intake, playbooks, and contract workflows, Crexi eliminated manual bottlenecks, organized institutional knowledge into a single platform, and transformed its legal function into a scalable engine for business growth.

Jessica Nguyen Joins Sandstone as President, Chief Strategy and Legal Officer

Jessica Nguyen Joins Sandstone as President, Chief Strategy and Legal Officer

Ocrolus Transforms Legal Precedent into Live Negotiation Intelligence

Ocrolus is a fast-growing, AI-powered document automation platform for financial institutions. With a lean legal team supporting a high-velocity organization, Ocrolus needed a way to bring order to fragmented intake, apply consistent negotiation positions, and convert historical decisions into "live" guidance available at the moment of negotiation. Sandstone became the operating layer across the tools the team already relies on—introducing structure to intake, enabling playbook-driven reviews, and providing leadership with a clear view of the legal workload.

Hypertherm Turns a Legal “Black Box” into a Playbook-Driven Operating System

Hypertherm is a global manufacturer supporting a complex, high-volume commercial environment. With significant NDA throughput and recurring agreement patterns, the legal team faced a classic industry bottleneck: a flood of low-value requests, limited visibility into total workload, and excessive time spent renegotiating the same issues. By implementing Sandstone as its operating layer for intake, playbooks, and workload insights, Hypertherm reduced "noise," standardized its negotiation positions, and began managing legal work with data-driven precision.

Legal Workflow Automation: A Guide for In-House Teams

Legal workflow automation: a guide for in-house teams

Sandstone Partners with LECG

The 10 Best Legal AI Tools & Software for In-House Teams in 2026

By 2026, the integration of AI into the legal department has matured. For in-house teams, the priority has shifted: it is no longer enough for a tool to simply summarize a document or draft a clause.

Sandstone and LegalEng Consulting Group Announce Strategic Partnership

Sandstone and LegalEng Consulting Group Announce Strategic Partnership to Accelerate AI Adoption for In-House Legal Teams

The Context-First Legal Department: Cutting the AI Noise and Solving the Context Tax

For the modern General Counsel, the current landscape is defined by a paradox: departments have more tools than ever, yet less time to think.

Former Goodwin COO Mary O’Carroll Joins Legal Tech Startup Sandstone as Product Adviser

Sandstone Announces Partnership with Legal Operations Expert Mary O'Carroll

Sandstone Announces Partnership with Legal Operations Expert Mary O'Carroll

The Evolution of the AI-Native Legal Department

The Evolution of the AI-Native Legal Department In-house legal departments are facing a period of increased operational friction.

Beyond Contract Review: The Untapped Use Cases for Legal AI

Untapped Use Cases for Legal AI

We Will Win by Doing the Hard Things

We will win by doing the hard things

Sandstone: Release Blog

Why Sandstone exists direct from Nick Fleisher, co-founder and CEO

This consultant advised Big Law at McKinsey. Now Sequoia is backing his AI startup.

Sequoia Leads Backing of AI Legal Technology Startup Sandstone

Sandstone Launches with $10M Seed Led by Sequoia to Usher in the Era of AI-Native Legal Departments

Sandstone Launch Press Release

Building Great Software That Happens to Solve Legal Problems

Why Legal Hasn’t Had its “Linear Moment”

Driving Legal Departments from Reactive to Strategic

Modern legal teams are drowning in low-quality requests. Solve the "Context Crisis" by integrating intake with business reality to stop chasing facts and drive strategic value.

Legal Leadership in the Age of AI

GCs must balance new risks with safe adoption. Success requires leading through uncertainty, finding the "Just Right" reliance level, and training lawyers in judgment and ethical reasoning.

Leading Beyond Legal: How GCs Navigate Decisions Outside Their Expertise

General counsels must navigate AI, technical risks, and business decisions beyond legal expertise. Learn practical frameworks for leading through uncertainty without becoming the "Department of No."

The Hidden Cost of Context Switching

In the high-stakes environment of an in-house legal department, being busy is often mistaken for productivity.

The Basic Introduction to AI for GCs

AI in the legal department has moved past the 'shiny object' phase. For General Counsel, the question isn't whether AI works—it’s where it works right now without increasing risk.

The Context-First Legal Department

A Strategic Buyer's Guide to Cutting the AI Noise and Solving the Context Tax