NACUA Recap: What Legal Leaders in the Higher Education Industry Are Prioritizing in 2026

Last week, I flew to Nashville for the 2026 NACUA Annual Conference (National Association of College and University Attorneys). It was Checkbox's first year attending, and I spent most of it in conversations with general counsels, deputy GCs, and OGC administrators from research universities, community college systems, and multi-campus institutions.

The sessions covered a wide range of topics. Intake and matter tracking, moving from reactive to proactive legal, proving legal's value to presidents and boards, and AI adoption inside university legal offices. Underneath the individual agendas, though, higher ed legal leaders kept circling back to the same underlying question:

“How do we run a modern legal function with the resources we already have?”

Here is what I heard, and what I think it means for where higher ed legal is headed.

1. Legal Is Becoming an Operational Function

The old picture of a university legal office was reactive. A request came in through email or a hallway conversation, an attorney handled it, and the work lived in someone's inbox (or if you were lucky… in a spreadsheet).

That model is quietly falling apart. Every GC I spoke with described some version of the same pressure. More requests, more complexity, more scrutiny from cabinets and boards asking for numbers. All with the same headcount.

The session on the modern higher education legal function highlighted that legal is evolving from a bespoke, qualitative, largely reactive service into a more structured operational function. Data-driven. Proactive. Scalable. Accountable for how it uses attorney time.

That shift changes what legal leaders need from technology. A better form does not solve it, and neither does a tidier tracker. What they’re really trying to get is a system that links how work comes into legal, how it flows through the team, and how it’s reported back to the organization.

2. Intake Is the Foundation of the Legal Data Model

The most repeated theme across sessions was legal intake, and it seems that there is still some confusion around it.

When people talk about intake, they usually mean the request form. But that framing is too narrow. Structured intake is where the legal data model begins. If you cannot capture who the requestor is, what type of matter it is, the level of risk, the deadline, and the responsible attorney at the point the work arrives, then everything downstream becomes guesswork.

You cannot report on cycle time if you do not know when the clock started. You cannot prove workload if you do not know what work is actually sitting in the office. You cannot triage by risk if the risk is buried in an email thread the associate GC has not read yet.

Reporting does not begin with a dashboard. It begins with how requests enter the function. A legal front door that sits between the business and legal, captures the right information at the moment work arrives, and routes it to the right person or process, is what makes the rest possible. Without that foundation, matter management, workflow automation, and executive reporting all rest on incomplete data.

3. Build vs. Buy for Legal Comes Down to Ownership

Plenty of higher ed legal offices are already building something. Microsoft Forms feeding SharePoint. Excel trackers maintained by a paralegal. Power Automate workflows stitched together by whoever on the team is most comfortable in the Microsoft stack.

Those environments are real solutions and they do work, at least at first. But, the build-versus-buy conversation at NACUA was not about whether an institution could build a form. It was about who owns the system once it is live? Who fixes the workflows that break when a policy changes? Who updates assignment logic when a new attorney joins? Who cleans the data when categories drift? Who manages permissions across a decentralized campus? Who keeps attorneys and campus users engaged with it two years in?

Homegrown environments tend to accumulate a maintenance debt that is not visible on day one. It shows up quietly as reporting gaps, adoption fatigue, and workflows that people stop trusting. Several of the legal leaders I spoke with had lived through that arc once already and were trying to avoid living through it again.

4. AI Legal Is a Governance Conversation

At NACUA, every vendor had an AI story and nearly every session addressed it, but the tone from higher education legal leaders was noticeably different from that of the broader legal tech market.

They were not skeptical of AI. They were skeptical of ungoverned AI.

The concerns were specific and consistent: privacy, confidentiality, ownership of inputs and outputs, vendor training rights, and compliance with state and federal law, along with the risk that a campus user might paste a student record into a public tool.

The strongest discussions focused on embedding AI within a governed operating model that draws only on approved institutional knowledge, operates within structured workflows with clear escalation paths and human oversight, and maintains a transparent record of its use. Higher education legal leaders are open to the productivity gains, but only within systems that allow them to clearly justify and defend how AI was used.

5. Adoption Is the Real Implementation Risk for Legal Tech

Several GCs told me even after implementing technically capable tools, they still found attorneys and business counterparties reverting back to email.

If attorneys avoid a system, it effectively fails. If faculty don’t trust a campus front door, they will bypass it. That’s what causes these projects to fail and the problem is usually not the software itself. It is about whether the workflow respects the attorney's time, whether the intake experience feels easier than sending an email, and whether the reporting actually helps the GC make decisions.

Any operating layer for legal teams in the higher education industry has to earn adoption from three different audiences at once:

1. Campus users need it to feel simple.

2. Attorneys need it to feel like a tool, not a tax.  

3. Leadership needs it to produce numbers they can act on.  

Missing any one of those groups tends to undo the other two.

What Are Higher Ed Legal Teams Prioritizing Next?

The majority of higher education legal teams are not looking for another point solution. Instead, they are focusing on trying to build the core infrastructure a modern legal function needs. That means intake systems that generate meaningful data, workflows that move work forward without friction, and matter visibility that stands up to executive scrutiny. It also means AI that is properly governed, not loosely embedded, and reporting that answers the questions leadership is actually asking.

Every institution I spoke with was at a different stage along that path. Some were just starting out, others had already made an attempt, but all were open to sharing and comparing their experiences.

If you’re curious how Checkbox thinks about the operating layer, schedule a call with one of our technology consultants and we will happily walk you through it.