The corporate legal department of the AI era will look like a Gazelle-phant.

That was one of my favorite concepts from this week's podcast with Bjarne Philip Tellmann.

The idea came from something Bjarne heard years ago while traveling through India with the president of Coca-Cola’s Indian operation:

To compete in a fast-moving market, you need to be an elephant on the back end and a gazelle on the front end.

For an inside legal team, that means:

The elephant:
A stable technology and data platform. Clean data. Defined processes. Governance. Infrastructure. Systems that reliably generate information and insights at scale.

The gazelle:
Small teams of highly skilled lawyers and legal professionals embedded closer to the business, able to react quickly, exercise judgment and move at the speed of their internal clients.

AI connects the two.

The backend increasingly becomes a mini “AI factory” that organizes data, generates insights and automates repeatable work.

Those outputs make the people on the front end faster and more capable.

And the work they do generates new data that flows back into the system, creating a continuous learning loop.

Bjarne’s warning about where to start: Not with the AI.

Start with the elephant.

What is Legal there to accomplish?
What problems are getting in the way?
What processes need to change?
What data needs to be organized?

Only then do you ask which technology accelerates the model.

A lot of organizations are trying to buy the gazelle before they’ve built the elephant.

And without the backend infrastructure, the front end can’t really run.