Intro

🎤 This week we sit down with David Bushby — Head of Legal Operations at Canva and the voice behind In Counsel Weekly — for a conversation that's part provocation, part practical playbook, and part three mates who love this stuff catching up over a good topic.  

David follows Sam Lewis as the second member of the brilliant Canva legal team to join us for a chat, and from our vantage it's easy to discern the talent, curiosity and sense of fun they must have coursing through their team.

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David has spent the last couple of years at the forefront of AI adoption in legal — not as a commentator, but as a practitioner. Custom GPTs, Claude skills in Cowork, vibe-coded legal research tools, Chrome extensions that make SaaS platforms do things they were never designed to do. He's materially contributing to the building of an AI-native legal function in real time.

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"I just started to feel, by the end of last year — we just really need to go it alone. We can control what tools we use... maybe the AI dividend is just up to us on the in-house side."

Here's a big question David has been grappling with (and we get into it straight away during our catch up): are law firms passing on their AI productivity savings to clients? The invoice data says no. The rate increases — 12–16% in the US and UK, with individual partner hikes of 25–35% — say definitely not. And at the line-item level? Nothing. 

So what does a smart in-house legal ops team do? They begin to contemplate going it alone.  David walks through Canva's owners mindset approach to outsourcing, the vibe-coded tools his team is building in Claude Code, and why the AI dividend might just be something in-house teams have to take for themselves.

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Connect with David Bushby — by subscribing to In Counsel Weekly — David's popular bite-sized weekly newsletter for in-house counsel | Or find him on LinkedIn 

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If you enjoyed our conversation, please do share it with someone who you think would be interested in listening (or is equally passionate or enraged by law firm productivity). And if you've got a spare minute, please rate the show and tell us what landed 🙏 It helps us grow our audience and continue to attract great guests like David.

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For more conversations at the intersection of law and technology, head to⁠ https://lawwhatsnext.substack.com/⁠.