Watch Infodash and Gowling WLG on The LegalTech Fund’s In Studio

Infodash CEO Ted Theodoropoulos and CTO Kameron Berget sat down with Al Hounsell, Senior Director of AI, Innovation and Knowledge at Gowling WLG, for Season 3 of The LegalTech Fund’s In Studio. Host Tanner Rogers asked the group a question most firms are working through right now. Should a law firm build its own AI and knowledge infrastructure, or buy it?

Gowling WLG chose Infodash for its client extranet in 2025, so the conversation draws on work the two teams have done together. The group gets into why custom builds are hard to scale, why data security and governance matter, and how firms can get more out of the Microsoft 365 they already pay for. Clients, they point out, care far more about quality, speed and cost than about the tools behind them.

What they cover

• Kameron on starting every build from the user story, and how that shaped the Gowling WLG work
• Al on the three cases where Gowling WLG builds instead of buying
• Why in-house builds get risky, from cost of ownership and key person risk to the gap between a demo and a product that scales
• What Infodash handles natively across Microsoft 365, Azure, PMS, DMS and permissions
• Ted on keeping the skill layer in the firm’s own tenant, and Al on where competitive advantage really sits
• Advice for firms just starting out, including Al’s four phases, Kameron’s crawl, walk, run approach, and why Ted expects legal engineers to matter as much as lawyers

The episode shares its title with Ted’s essay Own the Skill, Rent the Model. He argues that the leading AI model changes every quarter, so the asset a firm actually owns is its skill layer, the know-how it encodes for machines to run.