"The Capabilities Are Just Unlimited": CDW's Carla Michel on the power Ivo gives her team

Carla Michel has always believed in the power of technology to solve problems. And she knew that AI could solve one of the biggest issues her team faces. 

As Director, Senior Corporate Counsel at CDW, a Fortune 500 business offering technology solutions for companies in industries from healthcare to government to education, Carla oversees a high-volume, high-output legal team. Their work covers everything from technology licensing to managed services. It’s fast-moving, resource-constrained work, and for years, she was determined to find smarter ways to do it.

"Everything's rush, rush, rush," she says. "As most people with corporate in-house departments understand, you have to learn to do more with less."

Her first answer to improve slow, manual legal processes were comprehensive, carefully built playbooks that gave her team clear direction and allowed her to bring in support quickly when volume spiked. It worked, up to a point.  But Carla knew there was a next step coming, and that was automation. 

"Within the type of work that we do, there's a lot of what I would call low-hanging fruit. It's time-consuming and not interesting after a while. I knew that AI was coming into development, and I just kept a lookout for it. I'm like, surely there is going to be something that's going to help us automate the process."

Finding the right legal AI tool

In mid-2024, Carla and her team began the process of evaluating legal AI tools. They tested several, and she notes, the differences were clear. "Ivo definitely had the best results of all the ones we tested."

But to Carla, the real power of Ivo isn’t just automating contract review processes, though that has been valuable to her team. The real unlock for her was the combination of the review tool and Ivo Intelligence, which allows CDW the ability to gather business insights from their entire library of agreements going back decades. This unlocked some very powerful capabilities for Carla's team.

"The ability to derive data from large volumes of contracts is something that we've never had the ability to do before. Now…we're able to know exactly what our contracts say at any given moment. But even more importantly than that, we get to see on a broader basis how we contract with certain categories of suppliers. Where our sticking points are in our negotiations, where we need to evolve."

The ability to look across a portfolio of contracts and understand patterns, benchmarks, and negotiating positions at a level that simply wasn't possible before. She says, "[Intelligence is] a way to produce a better result in a shorter period of time. The functionality of that tool just never ceases to amaze me. The capabilities are just unlimited."

How legal teams should start with AI 

There’s a lot of noise in the market about how important working with AI is; there are hundreds of vendors and so much chatter about the right way for legal teams to adopt AI in their workflows. For legal teams still on the sidelines, Carla's advice is simple and direct.

"My overall advice would be: just start. Find a partner that you can work with that's going to give you the post-purchase support."

That last point matters to her. Adopting AI isn't just a technology decision. She notes that buying an AI tool is not just about purchasing software, it’s about learning to change the way her team thinks and works, and the quality of the partnership makes all the difference. And she believes she’s found a great partnership with Ivo. 

"I can say that the partnership we've had with Ivo has been instrumental in the AI journey. I've never worked with a more supportive team in any facet."