Our Take
A consulting interview about AI assessment is news only if it surfaces a pattern or a specific finding; this one reports a conversation, not a conclusion.
Why it matters
Legal departments are moving from vendor hype to internal capability review. How firms validate readiness before deployment matters because misalignment between strategy and execution kills adoption.
Do this week
General counsel: commission an independent AI readiness audit before selecting a vendor platform, so you know whether your team can operationalize recommendations.
InterAlia Consulting assesses legal AI readiness
Andrea Miskolczi, founder and managing director of InterAlia Consulting, discussed in-house AI assessment work at Lexpo in Amsterdam on June 8, 2026. Her firm has engaged with enterprise legal teams, including Erste Bank, to help evaluate organizational readiness for AI deployment and strategy formation.
The interview, part of TalkingTech's VoxPop series, covered the process of working with internal teams to audit current capabilities, identify gaps, and shape AI adoption roadmaps.
Assessment work signals a maturity shift in legal tech
Legal departments are moving beyond vendor selection into a harder problem: understanding whether their people, workflows, and risk tolerance can actually absorb AI tools. Assessment work is now a gating step, not an afterthought.
Erste Bank's engagement with InterAlia suggests that large financial services firms with in-house legal teams are treating AI strategy as a board-level competency question, not a software purchase. This implies a longer sales cycle and higher barrier to adoption for vendors who skip the assessment conversation.
How to evaluate AI readiness in your firm
An effective assessment covers three areas. First: technical baseline. What systems do you have? What data quality issues exist? Second: human readiness. Are your lawyers trained in prompt engineering? Do they trust the tools? Third: risk framework. What regulatory or client-facing constraints apply? Where does bias in the model hurt you most?
Consulting firms like InterAlia serve a real function here because they bring benchmarks from other legal departments and can flag blind spots internal teams miss. If you're considering AI adoption, hire an assessor before you contract a vendor.