Sagard’s legal department clinched the Law Department Innovation Award at the Canadian Law Awards for its bold approach to legal tech and process transformation – a recognition that signals a shift in what it means to deliver value as an in-house legal team. “We were recognized not as gatekeepers, but rather value-added business partners,” says Puja Kumar, deputy general counsel and assistant secretary at Sagard. The accolade caps a remarkable trajectory: Sagard has grown from managing US$500 million in assets in 2016 to more than $32 billion in assets under management in 2025. Keeping pace with that growth demanded a legal function that could scale just as quickly. The result is a department that not only kept up but set a new standard for innovation in legal operations.
Kumar describes her path as shaped by a desire to sit at the intersection of law, business, and innovation. Her experience spans complex cross-border transactions, governance, and risk management, beginning at McMillan LLP in Toronto before moving to roles at Third Eye Capital Corporation and Fiera Private Alternative Investment Management. In her various roles, she received hands-on exposure to every aspect of legal operations, from compliance to transaction structuring, laying the groundwork for her current approach at Sagard.
When Kumar joined Sagard, the legal team faced a core challenge: how to optimize processes in step with the firm’s explosive growth. “You need to find ways to make things scalable. Otherwise, you’re just creating an in-house mini law firm,” she says. The answer was a relentless focus on process optimization and technology adoption, culminating in the development of in-house digital platforms that have slashed turnaround times and delivered measurable savings.
At the forefront is the Sagard Marketing Assurance Review Tool (SMART), an AI-powered platform that transformed the firm’s marketing compliance review process. What once took up three days and cost thousands in external counsel fees is now routinely completed within 24 hours – with annual savings exceeding US$250,000. SMART’s machine learning capabilities continuously improve, with the long-term goal of allowing legal team members to focus on strategic, higher-value work.
That drive for efficiency and impact underpins Sagard’s approach to artificial intelligence. “We’re one of the first Canadian legal departments to adopt Harvey AI in the way we have,” Kumar says. Far beyond experimentation, Sagard is a super user, partnering directly with the vendor to shape product development. Playbooks built in Harvey AI now cover everything from real estate, covering leasing, acquisitions and dispositions, to placement agent agreements, allowing the team to draw on precedent and negotiate with unprecedented speed. “We now have a playbook where we can draw upon every placement agent agreement across our entire platform in minutes,” she says.
But the transformation goes deeper than just repeatable tasks. “Even those processes that are not repeatable, we’ve come a long way in the use of technology to help with those things that we previously didn’t think possible,” Kumar says. AI tools are now used for contract review, due diligence analysis, regulatory compliance monitoring and legal research, negotiation and drafting, delivering strategic insights and efficiencies that would have been out of reach with traditional methods.
Despite Sagard’s enthusiasm, Kumar is clear-eyed about the challenges. Change management remains a hurdle, with adoption varying across the organization. “We have categories of users - there are the super users that are using it for every single workflow, the middle-of-the-road users and those where old habits take time to change,” she says. The solution is training and fostering a culture of experimentation through team-wide “show and tell” sessions where members present creative solutions to challenges. Even summer students compete to propose the best AI use cases, ensuring innovation runs through every level of the team.
Sagard’s tech stack itself is broad: “We use Google Gemini, ChatGPT and Athenian for entity management (with built-in AI), alongside DiliTrust for corporate governance management. Of the tools that people find most useful in daily workflows, ChatGPT and Harvey AI rank highest.
For legal teams weighing tech investments, Kumar encourages looking outward as well as inward. She recommends approaching law firms and service providers to understand how they are approaching technology and participating in multiple demos with service providers to refine priorities. “Each demo clarified what our real needs were – and what they were not.” Her advice: focus on identifying specific pain points and invest in solutions that address them rather than chasing the latest trend.
Kumar also points to shifting expectations for external firms. “I don’t expect that I’m going to see billing for diligence memos that have hundreds of hours of time,” she says. With AI-driven document reviews, Sagard now looks to produce first drafts internally, leaving external counsel to focus on critical issues rather than repetitive tasks.
The biggest trend Kumar sees is the uneven adoption of AI across legal departments. “Many legal departments are talking about AI, but fewer are actually walking the talk,” she says. The risk for laggards is stark: “If you’re not going to take on AI, … you’ll fall behind and you’ll fall really quickly.” She urges in-house counsel to resist the temptation to be overly risk-averse but warns that AI is no substitute for human judgment. “AI doesn’t replace judgment. It doesn’t replace experience. I think it amplifies it.” she says.
Kumar will speak at the Canadian Legal Summit on a panel entitled “The one tool I can't work without – Legal pros share their must-have tech.”