Mayer Brown CIO: "AI Literacy Is Fundamental to Everything" — Governance Gate Before Tool Access

Evette Pastoriza, chief information officer of Mayer Brown, gave a detailed account of the firm's GenAI scaling strategy in a Legal IT Insider interview published July 9. The central architectural decision at Mayer Brown is that training is a prerequisite gate: no lawyer or staff member receives access to Copilot or Harvey until they complete the compulsory curriculum, which begins with risk, ethics, security policy, and client policy, and emphasizes "the importance of the human in the loop." Pastoriza's framing of AI literacy is specific and operationally significant — she distinguishes between using AI as a chatbot (low skill, easily picked up) and using AI as a meaningful thought partner (requires structured learning), arguing that the surface simplicity of the interface is the primary source of undertraining risk. The build-vs-buy question is being actively revisited: Mayer Brown is in what Pastoriza calls "a very hybrid time," building some things internally while evaluating the market for partial-build opportunities, with strategically significant capabilities evaluated on criteria including ROI, market availability, and intellectual property value. The firm's next KM priority is practice-specific training curricula — "the ultimate goal" — which Pastoriza describes as building on the horizontal Copilot/Harvey layer with use-case-specific instruction tailored to how individual practice groups actually work.